Coding Is Like Cooking

I’m very pleased to announce I’ve just published my first Pluralsight course – “Coding Dojo: Test Driven Development“! It’s based on the material in my book, converted to a video-friendly format along with audio commentary. If you purchase a subscription to the Pluralsight course library, you’ll get access to this video course, and hundreds of other courses aimed at software developers.

Since the video is also another iteration of my ideas and material, after I wrote the book, I’ve developed some themes, particularly around deliberate and incidental practice. I also had to focus more, and pick out the really important parts to talk about in the video. If you enjoy the video course, you might find the book contains useful extra material – especially the code kata catalogue.

I really think there is a big need in our industry for professional software developers to learn Test Driven Development and associated skills, and I can’t see it happening via the traditional method of instructor-led two day training courses. TDD is a practical coding skill that you actually have to do in order to get competent at it. It’s a lot more difficult in your average codebase than it needs to be, so a lot of people get discouraged and quickly go back to the way they wrote code before.

The Coding Dojo is a way to start a long term change in yourself and others in your team, and my hope is that the book and the video will provide you with the inspiration and means to get started.

This week I published my first book! I’ve been writing “The Coding Dojo Handbook” since last September, and publishing it as a work-in-progress on Leanpub.com. This week I decided it was time to declare it completed, since I think it hangs together as a whole book, and is useful in the role I imagined for it. In other words, I think this book has everything it needs to be a good starting point for someone setting up a new coding dojo, or for someone experienced in running one already, looking for ideas for new katas and collaborative games. I hope you’ll consider getting a copy if you’re in either of those situations!

Now the book is finished, I have to decide whether to look for a “real” publisher, or whether to just continue to sell it on leanpub. My current feeling is that my target audience, (programmers), are quite comfortable buying an ebook, and having a paper copy isn’t really a priority. The advantage of a publisher might be more sales channels, bookshops etc, and more copies sold overall. I’d also get a considerably lower proportion of the sale price. I’ve noticed that several authors I respect – people like Brian Marick and Roy Osherove – are publishing their newer titles exclusively on leanpub.com. So my current plan is to stick with leanpub and see how things develop.

I had originally planned a few more chapters, about London School TDD, and Approval Testing. When I started writing these chapters, I found I had far more to say than I had anticipated, and it didn’t seem to me that the material really fitted into this book. So what I’ve done is started a new book project, called “Mocks, Fakes and Stubs”

Right now it’s fairly small, more a pamphlet than a book, and I’m not charging a lot of money for it. If, as I hope, there is interest, I plan to add more material over the next few months. The focus is on showing TDD techniques using some of the code katas from “The Coding Dojo Handbook“. I’m hoping the new book will have the feeling of pair programming with an experienced coder, explaining the theory of a technique at the same time as demonstrating it.

I’ve got a couple of workshops coming up, at XP2013, when I’ll be doing research for my new book. Basically I’ll be using code katas to explore TDD techniques like Outside-In, Approval Testing, and Given-When-Then style BDD tests.

So my first book is finished, and I have a new book project to occupy my time!

I’m pleased to announce a new home for my blog: henceforth I will be blogging on the url “coding-is-like-cooking.info“. Please update your RSS feeds to point at the new site!

At some point I plan to delete my blogger account, since all the articles have been transferred to the new url. (If you find links between articles that don’t work on the new site, please let me know, there are some aspects the automatic import doesn’t handle very well.)

I’ve been using Blogger for years, and I can recommend it as being easy to use and quick to get started with. What’s prompted the change is that I really wanted to take full control of my content and the way it’s presented. Since I started this blog 6 years ago, it has turned from a hobby project into an important channel for me to present my newest ideas and get feedback from my peers in the community.

Over the last 6 months or so, the traffic on my blog has exploded. I used to average about 1000 page views per month, but since mid 2012 I’ve been consistently getting 3000-4000 page views per month. That huge peak in September 2012 corresponds to my article “SOLID principles and TDD”, which received lots of comments and tweets. The most recent peak corresponds to my follow-up series of posts about London School TDD.

Monthly Page views for “Coding is Like Cooking”

I think the reason for the increased popularity of my articles is that I’ve been spending more time writing, generally. I’ve been doing more research, more background reading, and working on my writing style. Some of my recent blog posts have also ended up becoming chapters in my book.

I hope all my readers will continue to follow my writings in their new home, on coding-is-like-cooking.info. I have more great articles planned!

I’m very excited to announce the launch of my company website, at http://bacheconsulting.com. The site has information about the coaching and training I offer, links to this blog, my videos on YouTube, and my twitter feed. My hope is that it gives an indication of my areas of expertise, and what you can expect if I come to work with your development team.

The site was built for me by my friend James Pink, who was very helpful with ideas for site layout and content. He also created my company logo from some sketches I did, and a rather dodgy photo of me hanging my head upside down with one ringlet of hair sticking out. Quite a tricky shot to take by yourself, even if your phone does have two cameras!

The pictures on the site are mostly from conferences – happy memories of good sessions at Agile 2008, XP2009 and XP2010. I’m very grateful to all the photographers for giving me permission to use them. I enjoyed searching through all the conference pictures, these guys really know what they’re doing with a camera, and seem to catch just the best moments. The profile shot I’ve been using for a couple of years now was taken by my friend Margaretha Schölin, when we were in China on a business trip together. More happy memories, thanks Maggan 🙂

I’d also like to thank the people who agreed to be quoted saying nice things about the work I’ve previously done with them. I’ll return the favour sometime soon, I’m sure.

So now all that remains is to hope that some more companies (preferably those in or near to Göteborg) will notice my site and want to hire me to help them learn agile engineering practices!

I had fun for a few months programming Ruby at eLabs, but now I’m moving on*. What exactly I’ll be doing next is not entirely clear. My plan, at least initially, is to work as an independent consultant specializing in automated testing and agile coaching. I’d also like to do some contract Ruby or Python programming. Hopefully I will find customers who are willing to hire me to do those things on a part-time basis, or with short term contracts, so I can do a mixture.

I have a long term dream to build some kind of product around PyUseCase and TextTest. I really believe in the approach Geoff has built for testing rich client python GUIs, and I’d like to see if it could be adapted for testing web applications. I have some ideas I’d like to try out, but I’ll need to find real customers with real applications and problems to try them out on. I’m hoping that will be possible through the agile testing consulting that I’ll be doing.

I’d also like to develop the idea of the coding dojo as a forum for teaching Test Driven Development and related agile engineering practices. I’m certain there is more that could be done to help people to get going with these skills. I’m looking into what courses are currently offered by local training providers, and hoping to both teach and develop those courses. I’m also working on my own formal training course based around the JDojo@Gbg meetings I led last year.

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I really enjoy going to conferences, and often speak at them. I don’t expect that to change much 🙂 Geoff and I are both scheduled to speak at Agile Testing Days in Berlin in October, which I am really looking forward to. It’ll be a chance for us to learn from some of the best in our industry, and share some of our ideas. Geoff’s testing tools are developing all the time, and I’ll be talking about what we’ve learnt from the many dojo meetings going on in Göteborg. I’ll be speaking together with my friend and former colleague Fredrik Wendt, a stalwart member of GothPy and assistant leader of JDojo@Gbg.

So it’s an exciting time for me, and I have several activities lined up to get me going with my new business. I’m also hoping to find a bit more time to spend writing articles for this blog. We’ll see if I succeed!

* eLabs is a very young company with only about 8 employees, and after I agreed to join CJ and his team back in January the company strategy changed a little. After I started in March, my role didn’t work out the way I’d anticipated. CJ and I had a good talk about it, and I think it’s with no hard feelings on either side that I left the company at the end of June.