Week 8
I started the eighth week of my tour visiting Codeship, a Vienna based startup offering hosted Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment solutions for many technologies and hosting platforms. Together with Codeship's development lead Clemens Helm I worked on a feature deep inside the Codeship's Ruby on Rails core. Clemens, of "Testing Tuesday" fame, created a guiding test with Cucumber and then switched to RSpec unit tests for the details. It was a great pairing experience despite that my Ruby skills have degraded considerably causing me to slow down Clemens a bit. Between pairing I joined the Codeship team playing some rounds of tabletop football and improved my skills there as well ;-)Then I spent three days at Irian, a Java Enterprise consultancy famous for co-founding the Apache MyFaces project. I worked with Jan Zarnikov on a new application in TypeScript. TypeScript, the new open source language from Microsoft, was designed for application-scale JavaScript development and compiles to plain JavaScript. I had never heard of it (it was just created last year) and Jan was concerned if I would be able to work with it. But I had no problems and we made good progress. Jan had prepared all the details in advance and we were just banging out the first version of a touch enabled learning game, driving the whole development by tests. It was awesome! Typescript looked cool and was easy to work with, just the development environment and infrastructure (outside of Visual Studio) needs to catch up.
Dojo Week 9
The following Monday I facilitated an in-house Code Retreat for two development teams. Although there were only ten participants, the final retrospective showed many learnings, which was proof for me that the Code Retreat was useful for them. I want to point out how great this Vienna based company is. Running Code Retreats as part of developer education is awesome and I only know a few companies that do things like that.
The rest of the week I attended the Agile Testing Days 2013, an annual European conference. I had been invited by the organizers to run the Coding Dojos each afternoon of the conference. I chose three different katas for the Dojos to keep things interesting. I started with Refactoring the Tennis Kata, a kata designed by Emily Bache. The provided source code of scoring a Tennis game was awful but had a comprehensive suite of automated tests which allowed the participants to focus entirely on refactoring. All seats were taken and we had a great Dojo with good discussions in the end. The following day I helped the participants to Design Test Cases for the Gilded Rose Kata, originally made up by Terry Hughes and modified by Emily Bache. The prepared code base contained some (spaghetti-) business logic but no tests. The participants were asked to add test cases. Again we had a great Dojo with good discussions in the end. For the third Dojo I had prepared the exercise of TDD as if you meant it, as proposed by Keith Braithwaite. I considered it a difficult exercise and the participants were struggling with the concept in the beginning. After some time they made progress and even skipped the break to enjoy pair programming for additional 25 minutes. Obviously they meant it ;-)I did not pair program with anybody during this week, but learned many new things in the conference sessions and taught a few things to the participants of the Coding Dojos. I had great discussions in the evenings with like minded people and made some new friends as well. Food was provided at the conference venue and travel cost was refunded by the conference organizers. All these facts come pretty close to the requirements for my Journeyman Tour ;-)
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