A while ago I was attending the Global day of Coderetreat in Zurich. It is a day long coding practice event. Attendees work together in groups of two. In each session we coded the kata “game of life” from scratch puttygen , each time with different constraints. The constraint I found very interesting was this: Continue reading
fundamentals
Review 2017 and Resolutions 2018
Review 2017 Here’s a quick review of the goals of 2017: Deploy and maintain “Level It!”. It is deployed and I developed the second release with several improvements. See Level It! page Chess engine that beats me. I developed the engine however it does not beat me yet. See Manta Chess Engine on Github Read Continue reading
Regex Jumpstart Tutorial
Several times in a project I had to use regular expressions to match some pattern in a string. I started reading several tutorials but the regexes looked just too cryptic to me. Fortunately I always found the answer on Stackoverflow that either did exactly what I wanted or something similar that could be adapted easily. Continue reading
Why is “catch (Exception ex)” a problem?
Let’s consider the code below. In the try block there is a bug (null reference exception). This is then caught in the catch block and logged. Why is this catch (Exception ex) a problem? There is a bug in the try block. If the bug is just logged you are unlikely to notice there is Continue reading
New Year’s Resolutions 2017
In the area of software I am going to do these things this year. 1. Deploy and Maintain the Mobile App I like the mobile game I developed last year pretty much. So I it would be sad to just upload it to Google Play and forget about it. Therefore I need to do some Continue reading
Review New Year’s Resolutions 2016
In the area of software engineering I wanted to do three things in 2016: Do 10 Code Katas I did them as written recently in the first and the second post. Katas are very nice little tasks to practice understanding requirements, designing classes, and implementing them. Here’s a new insight about TDD that I had: Continue reading
The Software Craftsman by Sandro Mancuso
This is a great book! Before reading I didn’t know there is an actual software craftsman movement. I’ve heard Uncle Bob use the term but I was unaware of the movement. The book totally speaks from my heart. Many of the attitudes and ideas described by Sandro Mancuso are very similar to my own and Continue reading
New Year’s Resolutions 2016
In the area of software I’m going to do three things this year. 1. Practice TDD Recently it clicked in my head that TDD isn’t that much a testing tool but a design tool. If it is possible to test the production code with simple tests then the production code itself is simple enough. As Continue reading
Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
What is Domain Driven Design? The idea is to create a model of the domain. You do this by understanding, collecting and organizing the knowledge of the domain experts and putting it into the model. The domain is the area in which the software is supposed to solve problems. So in a banking application the Continue reading
Agile, TDD and Personal Responsibility
Now I have been working as a Software developer and architect for more than 10 years including 5 years using C# .NET. The last few years I engaged in agile and Test-Driven-Development (TDD). I find it really fascinating what some smart developers came up with. These things were not around when I was at university Continue reading