19 October 2013

Awesome Week 6

Leave 80cm SpaceJourneyman Tip: Plan for some space each month
I try to keep the pairing sessions of my Journeyman tour free of any appointments. If we spend only two or three days I do not feel comfortable in coming late or leaving early, there is just not enough time. My calendar was blocked by pairing sessions entirely until my first "free" day last week. It was a busy day, and I used it to prepare a few things for our upcoming Eclipse DemoCamp in Vienna. And I had a job interview. (The position looked cool but in the end it turned out the vacancy was not for a developer but for a Unix sys-admin guru, someone who compiles his own kernel for fun now and then.) They day was too full, I had packed too much into it. So I recommend leaving one or two days without any pairing session each month, to catch up with all the things that need to be done. Corey did the same thing, splitting his journey into tours of up to four weeks, and also Daniel Temme ended his Journeyman weeks after four weeks.

Week Number Six
The remaining days of the last week I visited SIB Visions, a company focusing on the simplification of the software landscape used to support business processes. The backbone of their application stack is the JVx Enterprise Application Framework which was open source right from the start. If you need to build a typical business application to edit data in table- or master-detail-style, this is the framework you want to use. Check it out!

First I paired with René Jahn, SIB Visions' Head of R&D. He had a list of things he wanted to discuss with me. We started with the build. I complained that it was too slow, running longer than a hour, and that there were failing tests. We immediately started fixing them. Then René showed me the framework and I was impressed. The JVx code-base is following a strict standard defined by René, covering documentation, naming and much more. While I did not agree to some of his conventions I did admire the consistency in the code base. I believe that consistency is crucial for quality of a code base, some time ago I even declared it the First Law of Code Quality. Well done JVx team, I like that ;-)

Then I worked with Martin Handsteiner, CTO of SIB Visions, on a particular tricky problem. A main class of JVx' data model had grown larger than 5000 lines and needed to be split. Due to performance optimizations it worked with plain object arrays internally, following the Flyweight Design Pattern, which did not make it easier to understand. We fought the beast for two days and were able to split away a few hundred lines of code. It was hard work, but just the beginning of a longer rework Martin had estimated to take two weeks. It should never have become that large and entangled in the first place. Martin had always wished for a keyboarder/keyboardist and a "mouser" and thus stayed in the navigator role for most of the time. While it was unusual for me to be the driver for extended periods of time, it worked out well because Martin knew the concept of his model and I was moving forward relentlessly.

Caps-Lock is FULL OF AWESOME!!1!Just yesterday I received mail from René telling me that his build now takes nine minutes, 900% faster than last week and that all tests are green. I was delighted. For the first time one of my hosts had taken my ramblings serious and immediately fixed the issues. Awesome, that is the right spirit. Keep up the good work!

Remote Pair Programming
Even more awesomeness happened at the weekend. My friend Thomas Sundberg asked me for help with his presentation on (Remote) Pair Programming at 33rd Degree for charity in Kraków, Poland. He needed a remote pairing partner for a small demo. We frequently do remote pair programming katas since more than a year and were sure we could pull it off. During lunch break we tested connectivity and the audio equipment of the conference venue, to make sure that everybody would hear me. During the demo we did a few cycles of TDD, discussing names and refactoring the code in ping-pong style as usual. I was sitting at home, still contributing to a conference talk - it was awesome!

2 comments:

Peter Kofler said...

Thomas just told me that he uploaded the slides of his talk about (Remote) Pair Programming.

Peter Kofler said...

Also René posted why the pair programming experiment with me was awesome and why you should do similar things.

I especially like his conclusion The experiement was awesome and Code-Cop is a pro’ geek. I need to print this, frame it and put it on the wall ;-)