So i just finished watching a rendition of our new apprentice’s bowling kata. His name is Josh, so I will refer to him as such going forward.
Josh has gotten a handle on clojure pretty quickly and has even jumped into using some functions that I will admit I would have considered pretty intimidating in my second week. Nonetheless, it was very cool to see someone else’s rendition of this kata.
I know I had watched uncle bob’s kata being performed in java several times to understand the flow of TDD, and then I attempted it in clojure without deviating much from the structure mainly because I probably didn’t really know how to at the time.
Other things I did today. I broke tic-tac-ruby-o by way of object sabotage. Objects are cool and i do like them. They are like little containers to hold everything that matters only to them. However, when using an object, you have to keep track of when you send an entire object into a function or even a new object as well as when you send just a piece of it.
I kicked off tic-tac-ruby-o with the minimax, expecting it to need certain information. I felt like this might actually keep things a little cleaner. I still feel this way, but because i was still learning ruby (and honestly, it’s been several months since i’ve messed with any objects), i got a little lost in what my minimax needed and what I’d given it where.
I got it all figured out, and my game runs now. All i have left is, well, main; player implementations (ai/human); and um, set up. I do believe this will be my cleanest product so far, and as I mentioned, it has kind of turned into a big kata itself.
One of these days, on my own time, i’d like to try tic-tac-clojure one more time. I’d like to get it done in a day. Something simple–no gui’s. Just simple terminal tic-tac-clojure. I think I would do this backwards too. Or perhaps forward and then realizing as things get complex, that it needs to start at the end. Weird.
That is a big difference between bowling & tic-tac-toe that I’ve learning very recently. Bowling starts at the beginning: the easiest test to pass is a gutter game. Tic-tac-toe starts at the end. The easiest test to pass is a cat’s game followed by a win. So that’s interesting. The first time i went about tic tac toe, i started with an empty board, and then i did a cat’s game, and then i think i did cheating games where only x or o was playing, and then i went to the beginning of a game and counted up, which was hard! Counting backwards, is much easier.
Anyway, i gave myself until stand up to work on tic-tac-ruby-o, and after stand up i had a meeting with my friend from my former-former company to review the proposal in ‘friendly’ terms. After that, where I’d left tic-tac-ruby-o–with a failing test–was itching me, so i allowed myself to go back to it for just a little bit to get that test to pass. Then, Object Sabotage! I couldn’t leave it in that state!
So several hours later, i finally had it fixed, but then I had to refactor those couple things that were going to drive me nuts in the back of my mind if I were to even try to focus on anything else. So yeah. There went my day… Well, i did work on trello later in the afternoon for a couple hours, but not nearly the time I’d wanted to put in, so i’ll be groveling this weekend to be allowed to work a little bit to catch up on trello, since I haven’t really started on the new stories yet and have only really cleaned up the ‘bugs’ (except the one I haven’t mentioned yet…) from last iteration.
I don’t like wednesday iterations. By the time it’s done, there’s really only a couple hours left in a day. So then, it’s really only like there are four work days left. By Friday, i can’t really judge how close or far I am from finishing, because i have the weekend, but i can’t really say how much of the weekend I’ll be able to use. Then suddenly it’s monday, and i work & work, but then ‘omg! It’s tuesday’ and i get frantic.
At this point, while i’m slow, i’ve been writing productive code–even in trello, which is a nice change of pace. I think I’ll still be able to get the stories at least mostly done, if not fully done. I don’t think they are going to be terribly hard–except on the js side maybe, so monday i should probably escalate, yet again, that i won’t be done… Yikes! How does one do this?!
Rex:
Tonight I asked Rex what he wants to be when he grows up. He then dumped ice-cold water all over himself (on accident) and cried. I cleaned that up and asked him again. He thought about it, and I offered some options: a fireman? An engineer? A scientist? A racecar driver? A pilot? An astronaut–”No, I don’t want to go into space.”
“Really, because, honestly, i’ve always thought you’d be on the Mars mission.”
“Nope. I don’t want to go into space.”
“Ok, so what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Um. I just want to be Blaze.”
“Blaze? The nickelodeon monster truck?
“Yeah… I just want to be Blaze. I like Blaze.”
“Ok. Rex.”
Leo: As I’ve mentioned, Leo too is obsessed with Blaze, and the only thing that he has really gotten really good at enunciating, besides “No”, is “Let’s Blaze!” [“aye Bayze!”]