from my work as a developer
Archive for June, 2009
super fast
Jun 30th
Today’s day was super fast, I spent whole day solving bugs and I closed most of them, nothing special, mostly some typos and misunderstands. And at least, I improved my statistics, I closed something about 5 bugs in one day. Till today I had been solving one bug per week! Impressive?
the day after
Jun 29th
At last I had time to wrote few words about conference on which I had been attended during weekend – COOLuary v2 in Gdansk. It wasn’t ordinary conference, it was UnConference. There isn’t agenda on such conferences, it’s created by the attendees on the beginning. There aren’t presentations, just talks on proposed subjects. There is lot of discussions and knowledge transfers around – brain donor. I also met very clever guys from Spartz.com which are cooperating with Atlassian, it was very interesting and knowledgeable!
On the second day was a workshop and I leaded one session about TDD – Randori Session. After all I was totally exhausted, but it was worth to spent two days in Gdansk and 5 hours in a train 
Any way, today I had to go back to work and few bugs were waiting for me. I did one simple bug and also some minor refactoring with that class – following boy scout rule – leave the campground cleaner that you found it. To close few more bugs, I spent the rest of the day confirming if them really were bugs – so boring.
a day without hangover
Jun 26th
The wine testing experience was quit nice, I learned a lot about a wine and how to drink it, how to feel all the best. You don’t have to love it, but there is magic which can be introduce to your life, all is needed is to give it a chance.
Yeah, but today I had to forgot about that and stick with a real world! I went back to refactoring I had started day before. When I dug deeply I discovered that I had to made another change. I did it, but that was the last. I just wanted commit the changes to repository so I started playing with tests. I had to solve some small mistakes (NullPointerException and ClassCastException ) and I was able to finish the work. I committed them all to the repository and went home – you know this pattern? Commit and Exit 
The incoming weekend I will spend on UnConference in Gdansk, I’m looking forward for a great time!
the evolution
Jun 26th
Today I took a look on the internal framework. It isn’t a real framework, but rather a bunch of reusable classes. I’ve been looking around and discovered some classes made by an Architect from the Task Force. It was almost the same crappy code as we made, but was alder. So, it brought home to me, that he wasn’t a a perfect developer from beginning, he evolved and still evolves. He accepted his mistakes and was able to took over them, so I should do the same!
After lunch I started some simple refactoring to help my fellow to solve a bug. He changed some parts on his side and I did the same on my. And then I discovered that I’m not able to commit my changes to the repository. They will break the tests without changes introduced by him. The same was with him, he wasn’t able commit changes without my changes. The classic deadlock! He sent me his changes by e-mail and I implemented them on my local copy, but then the day was over. I went for a nice company event, we have been tasting the wines, so nice!
task force
Jun 24th
Our project have a big problems with performance and to improve that, the Task Force was introduce few weeks ago to help us. The Task Force are the group of very experienced Software Architects which are trying to dig in to the application to find what is wrong, what “stinks”
Today, we spend the whole day on the meeting with Task Force, we have been discussing what is wrong, how can we improve the Code Quality and how to be a better software developer I can agree with them in many places, they have been presenting almost the same point of view as “Uncle” Bob in the book Clean Code, but I also disagree in some other places. Anyway, I’m planning to take some time to try to introduce theirs idea and to see what will happen, incoming vacation’s period it’s a good opportunity to do that!
the beginning
Jun 24th
This is the first entry, hopefully out of many, the first step for on a long journey to become a better software developer, I have some experience, I’m not a rookie, but I want to keep improving my skills, to deal with my weaknesses and achieve developer’s haven (if it exists
Ok then, let start, what did I do today?
I spent the whole day fixing one small bug, NullPointerException, but to fix it, I also had to change the logic for some other parts of the application. Fortunately, we had some unit tests (not as many as it should be), but at least one of them was falling after my change. To correct it I had to spent the rest of the day on that. Right now, when a change is affecting more then one classes, I always start all the tests. It takes 30 minutes to finish them, but still less then time spent on solving bugs introduced by the change. I had to change many things and also learned something new about the application, I understand it better now. So, anyway, I will try to spend some time in the future to improve tests performance
After all I was able to commit the change to the repository which didn’t break anything and that was a success!
