Coding Is Like Cooking

My weekend jog through the park was particularly interesting this week. Not just because of the light sprinkling of snow, bright sun and freezing temperatures. I had to watch my footing every time I heard myself interrupt Geoff or forget someone’s name. Yes, I was on my own. And no, nothing wrong with my head. (nothing serious, anyway). I was listening to the latest agile toolkit podcast where Bob Payne interviews Geoff and me.

In a previous post I was rather critical of Bob’s interviewing technique, and perhaps this is justified. He is a really genuinely friendly guy though, who is warm and enthusiastic towards people and that does make up for a lot. In the interview he did make some random joke about Thoughtworks that I still don’t get, but on the whole I think we got on ok.

In the first part of the interview we talk alot about how TextTest grew up in an environment of long running batch processes, and a bit about the crew planning system that Geoff wrote it to deal with. I hope listeners don’t decide this is boring and switch of at this point, because it does do more than just that. I talk a bit about what we did with TextTest on ‘Programming with the stars’ and then we discussed what else it is good for (legacy code, and even greenfield TDD development).

I did try to think through beforehand all the things I was going to say, but intevitably I left out a couple of important points. Neither of us mentioned that TextTest is written in python but can test any language (so long as it can produce plain text log output). I didn’t make it clear that I don’t work for Jeppesen, rather my new employer IBS JavaSolutions kindly paid my conference ticket. I said that ‘I’ got the highest marks in the stars competition instead of ‘we’ (forgive me Michael and Geoff! We did it together, I know)

Overall I think the podcast is worth listening to though. I hope it will encourage some people to try out texttest, and write automated tests for some code that they thought was untestable.

The second official meeting of the Gothenburg Python User Group was last night. Eight of us turned up, despite my writing the wrong address on my meeting invite. (It is Norra Ågatan 10A, not 6A – sorry!)

Anyway, in the first part of the meeting Jacob Hallen explained about PyPy, a very interesting project. It seems PyPy aims to replace jython, iron python, stackless and a host of other things, and has nearly as good performance as cpython. Jacob reckoned it would be ready for general use in about a year’s time.

After fika, Johan gave a short presentation about how he uses Python at Nordea. Although the company policy is only to use Java and Cobol, he has had some successes with using python too. He’s written several small applications that have been quick and cheap to build and have lasted much longer than their initially projected lifetimes. Unfortunately he hasn’t persuaded anyone else at Nordea to write any python yet.

The coding challenge for the evening was KataRomanNumerals which went very well. We split into four groups and in less than 45 mins three of the groups had working solutions, all different, all elegant in their own way. My group was the one that didn’t come up with a solution and that was because I was more interested in how to define the tests than how to define the solution 🙂 I wanted to write the tests in a spreadsheet then generate unittest test cases. It kind of worked. I will try again another time with FIT instead.

Most importantly, everyone said they enjoyed the evening and the chance to write some python code, just for fun.

For those of you who read Swedish, I have a new post up on jsolutions.se. The gist of it is that I usually read infoq to find out what is going on in the world, and I’ve just realized how biased it is compared with other Java news sources.

Last night a group of eight python hackers were drawn into a darkened conference room on Odinsgatan “Odin’s street” in order to exchange little-known information and to take part in obscure coding rituals. To open proceedings, Andrew Dalke shared deep insights into the enigmatic “stackless” python. Later on, fuelled by strong Swedish coffee and cucumber sandwiches, we together attempted the “BankOCR” Code Kata. Everyone present contributed to further our art, and most took a turn working the somewhat arcane keyboard and IDE. By the end we had created a perfect although incomplete code chimera. Despite our considerable successes, it may need further work before any bank would consider taking on our design for their optical character recognition system.

And now I must confess to the part I have played in this pythonic plot. It is the result of scheming between Andrew Dalke, Johan Lindberg and myself. We joined together a few weeks ago to make arrangements for the creation of this chapter of the python community. By some twist of fate, I was designated “temporär ordförande”, or “acting high priest”.

Three hours of pythonic union notwithstanding, everyone present last night agreed that the experiment should be repeated. We look forward to the continuation of our assembly at the second Gothenburg Python User Group meeting sometime next month.