Things are coming together well with the Season of Ruby. Getting out of my comfort zone was a driving theme and there has been some discomfort, but I am now establishing a new comfort zone, familiarizing myself with a new language and new tools. There is still a lot of work to do, but I am really pleased with how things are going. And with that, on to the retrospective.
What Went Well
- Got to write more code this iteration. I wrote a Ruby implementation of Conway’s Game of Life. I really love to code and sometimes I don’t get to do that enough in my day job. Solving a problem was a lot of fun.
- I stayed true to TDD, which is my standard way of working, but given the new tools it is important to stay true. So far I have been using test-unit, but I also got a look at some RSpec.
- Played around with forking a project on github, starting to get more comfortable with the workflow.
What Can Be Improved On
- I hit a roadblock with TDD when I got to a point where in .NET I would use a mocking framework. The reason I wanted to mock was because I was interested in testing behavior and not state. I wanted to know that the GameOfLife class was interacting with the Cell class in the correct sequence. Need to understand how that type of testing would be done under Ruby.
- I need to understand how to structure my projects in Ruby. That will mean looking at more code and also learning tools like Rake.
- Start thinking about the overall roadmap of this adventure. I’m into it far enough now that I am starting to feel comfortable with the tools, now it is time to start doing some longer range (1-2 month) planning.
I still have some work on Ruby fundamentals, but I would like to get a simple Rails project under my belt to give me some context and also to start the long term thinking. I was considering the Ruby on Rails Guides, but now think I will take a crack at Michael Hartl’s tutorial. It seems a little richer and also seems to really focus on testing.
Iteration 3 Stories
Old Dog, New Tricks 