A Dozen Weeks

Gilded Rose, again
In the 12th week of my Software Craftsmanship tour I ran an in-house Coding Dojo for a team that wanted to improve their unit testing skills. After an introduction what constitutes (and what does not) a good unit test I wanted them to practice. Understanding the concept of unit tests and using the corresponding testing framework was no big deal, but applying all the principles in practice was harder than it looked. I asked them to write the Test Cases for the Gilded Rose Kata, an exercise designed by Emily Bache. Since I participated in Emily's session during this year's XP conference in Vienna, I just love this kata. Although creating test cases for a small piece of logic might seem trivial, there is so much one can learn here. I had run the same kata during one of my Dojos at Agile Testing Days before and got a lot of positive feedback. If you got curious about the kata, it is described in full detail in Emily's excellent Coding Dojo Handbook.

Quality important is. Fight for it you must ;-)
Next I visited Gregor Riegler. I had not known Gregor before my tour, but his blog Be a Better Developer had attracted my attention. I really liked its subtitle "Quality important is". When I studied his blog I noticed that he was from Austria, even Vienna. I immediately sent him an email and Gregor was interested in my tour right away. Although it looked like we would not be able to pair, he managed to get approval from his management in the end. I spent three days in the office of EBCONT enterprise technologies, in the 34th floor of the Millennium City and enjoyed the view.

Gregor called himself a Restifarian and so we rightfully worked on a REST API for his current project. The Spring Web-MVC powered REST resources would just display data from the database, and first it looked that there would be no particular logic to put into the resource controllers. But we needed links to related resources, the so called hypertext. We had great discussions how to create and add these links to the response in a DRY way without messing up the domain model which we wanted to stay independent of any technology. I liked our session very much and learned a lot both about REST and learning in general. Thank you Gregor!

November is DemoCamp Time
Since the very first Eclipse DemoCamp in Vienna, November 30th 2009, we kept up the tradition of organizing an Eclipse DemoCamp twice a year. So Friday afternoon was demo time. For the ninth time the Vienna Eclipse enthusiasts met to see all the cool technology being built by the Eclipse community. There were great presentations by Tom Schindl, Gunnar Wagenknecht and Benjamin Cabé as well as some local people. The closing presentation was Flo's famous demo remote controlling Sharky. It was a pleasant event and socialising continued till late night. You should definitely attend our next DemoCamp in June. To keep updated about it, follow us on Twitter: @edcvienna. (Please note that the Twitter handle was changed recently.)