Test Driven Development on ilikeorangutans

Book Arrival: The Ray Tracer Challenge

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 09:58:18 -0400

I was browsing the Pragmatic Bookshelf and this book caught my eye: writing a ray tracer from ground up with a test driven approach? This sounds like a fantastic challenge to me. I always was interested in ray tracers but always thought it too complicated a topic to do it myself. However, test driven development has helped me work on some complex and terrible code bases, so this feels reassuring to me.

Notes on Working Effectively With Legacy Code

Mon, 02 Jul 2018 12:02:03 -0400

I recently received my copy of Working Effectivly With Legacy Code and have been busy reading it. The book, as a product of its time, has examples of not only Java, but also C++, probably to show concepts and techniques that apply to languages that behave differently in terms of linking and building. But regardless of its examples not really applying to what I work with, it was full of useful vocabulary and techniques to work with not only legacy systems, but really, any kind of system.

Inspiration and Action

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 11:27:01 -0400

I’m currently re-reading Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests, and this quote really spoke to me:

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

– Frank Tibolt

I think of myself as a perfectionist, the kind of person that hates to produce anything short of flawless. And while this is great quality to have because it drives me to improve and progress, it’s also incredibly crippling and frustrating. I’ve often noticed that while I had great ideas, I would often fail to implement them because I would try to over engineer my approach so it would solve everything perfectly. Obviously, many of these ideas and projects never went anywhere. But then on the contrary, ideas where I just started hacking something together often went much further and produced something usable and new.

Grails 2 Testing Guide

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 13:59:40 -0400

Note: I’m still working on this post, but I already use it as a reference so there’ll be more content over time.

I’ve been quite busy at work with updating a Grails 1.3 application to 2.3.4. While writing a test harness it became apparent that lots of things have changed since I’ve last worked with Grails. Many changes are for the better, especially the integration of Spock framework. However, there were some issues that took me a while to figure out. The Grails docs on testing are comprehensive, but long. Here’s my cheat sheet.