Markjuh

This afternoon and evening I’ve been reading a bit more in the fabulous book by Kent Beck. Not quite sure when I finished doing work today, since I’ve done a few things in between. But the reading really made me want to do some serious test-driven development. :)

This morning, I started working around 9:15. After catching up with the Rails weblog, I started reading “Test-Driven Development (By Example)” by Kent Beck. I’ve finished Part I and so far it has been quite inspiring. It has some nice parallels to the way Multiprogramming is taught by Wim Feijen at our university; in this course you learn to first focus on the simplest possible correct implementation and then worry about progress requirements. To make the parallels more explicit, I like to point out constructing correct implementations from a specification is not so different from making tests and trying to implement the simplest possible thing that fulfills these tests. The test can be seen as a sort of specification in this TDD-methodology. Often it occurs that the progress requirements in multiprogramming problems require you to do refactoring of the implementation. So far TDD sounds logical and actually gives testing a better place in the way I think about programming.

The Fibonacci-example in Appendix II made it clear that it fits really well with the formal programming style I learned in university. I think I’ll write a comparison of the two methods of working later when I have some spare time.

Yesterday, I left work around 17:15. It took me some part of the day to document some user interface related things in Instiki”, a wiki-system built upon Rails. I thought Instiki would be helpful, but weird enough the stable version had a few annoying bugs which bothered me. After some research, I found out that the problem was fixed in the SVN-version of Instiki. On the one hand this has cost some precious time, but on the other hand it had me looking at several Rails and RedCloth (library for Textile support) topics.

Today, I arrived half an hour late at work, because the NS decided to cancel a train. So, I arrived around 9:00. Then around 9:45, Thijs and I had a brief meeting to discuss what I have been doing and what we both expect to do the coming weeks and more specifically, what I will be doing this week. He suggested that I should also make a quick, functional prototype and write unit tests for the models and also some functional tests. It will be nice to at least briefly touch every aspect of the Rails framework and see what kind of troubles you can run into.

So, what did I do today besides fucking up two important files? Well, mostly been busy with blogging engines today.

I first registered with Six Apart to be able to test their TypePad online blogging service and download Movable Type, which you can install on your own webserver. Getting a TypeKey is quite an annoying process - if I didn’t have to research this, I would have stopped after 1 minute of annoyance – but finally I got everything to work. I got an error message somewhere and filled out an error report and to my amazement they looked at it, pointed me in the right direction and didn’t forget to mention that by the looks of it in their logs, I had figured out what to do myself. So, buggy process, but good feedback. Installing Movable Type was alright, but more annoying than other products.

Then registering with Blogger... This went really painless, just enter some information and you’re good to go. The only negative thing I found so far is that they don’t send an email to confirm your account.

So, which leaves us with WordPress. No registration to be able to download anything, easy installation - once you figure out that you have to set cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 in your php.ini – and good usability.

Which leaves me with the installation of Typo, which I will do tomorrow morning. And then I’m ready to make use cases and screenshots of the different blogging systems. But for now, I call it a day, after working from 8:30 to about 17:15.