CodeCopTour Week 2

Culture Shock
My second week's journey brought me to the highest towers of Vienna (see picture on the right). After previous week's startups this felt different. Paul Rohorzka had invited me to join him for two days. I had not known Paul before but had seen his name on the manifesto. Later when I met him in person during a Code Retreat I told him about my tour and he immediately agreed to pair with me. Working for a regular company TechTalk he had to get permission for my visit which took some time to figure out but finally he managed.

In the morning Paul surprised me with a list of several things he wanted to work on. On his current assignment he worked alone and lacked potential reviewers and therefore wanted several pieces of his code discussed. He had prepared his expectations, work packages and a list of verification "milestones" for these two days. After previous' week marathon coding sessions I felt like using Pomodoros and his work packages were sized small enough to fit into Pomodoros which we kept doing both days.

On the first day we worked on improving the readability of his specs. He used SpecFlow, a BDD testing tool for .NET, which worked just fine. I am generally disappointed by .NET tooling, but I was positively surprised how nice SpecFlow worked, just like you would expect it to work. Although we did not finish the work on the specs, Paul wanted to work on something else the second day, to get as much coverage of his work as possible. We dived into test infrastructure and reworked the part for creating test data. Its core class really needed some refactoring and we spent the entire day cleaning it up and making it ready for new features Paul knew he would have to add soon.

Paul is a true craftsman. I thought that I was a structured worker, but he was much more structured than I, which was nice to witness - there is always room for improvement ;-). Although I had never worked with C# before we had a shared understanding and were productive after the first hour. I enjoyed working with him and had a great time. Thank you Paul.

In the middle of the week I moderated the September Coding Dojo of the Scala User Group Vienna. (A Coding Dojo is a meeting where a bunch of coders get together and work on a small programming challenge to improve their skills. You can find more information about Coding Dojo in Emily's excellent Coding Dojo Handbook.) It was their eight dojo and I wanted to try something more advanced than basic code katas. I chose the TDD as if you meant it exercise by Keith Braithwaite. This was a difficult exercise and it was difficult on purpose, but the participants did well, much better than I did my first time during GeeCON 2012. It was my first time facilitating and their first time working through this exercise, and all of us learned a lot.

Yak Shaving
The remainder of the week Florian Pirchner hosted me in the office of his company Lunifera. I knew Florian since several years as organized the Eclipse DemoCamp in Vienna together. Lunifera was a development shop specialized in OSGi technologies and its "office" was still located in the living room of his flat which made a comfortable place to work and we had a lot of fun. But the work - the work was terrible and we spent almost three days Yak Shaving.

When I arrived at Lunifera, Florian showed me his current pet project, a radio controlled air swimmer, a flying shark, using BeagleBone, Arduino, many cables and - of course - OSGi technology. He prepared the project for his upcoming talk at EclipseCon Europe and needed some third-party code deployed to Eclipse Virgo, an OSGi compliant server. And it just did not work. After reading the documentation several times, we started from scratch, took baby steps and reproduced the smallest examples from the documentation. Based on these working Virgo examples, we moved forward to implement the code he needed, a m2m server based on Apache ActiveMQ. Besides some integration tests, we did not write a single line of Java, but many lines of poms, manifests, Spring and other XML configurations. I hate infrastructure work. Finally we got it to work and Florian was thankful for my help on this task, I even got a new nick-name "Config-Cop" ;-)