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.
What Am I Going To Do To Improve Things
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
“Stories” is a reach this iteration. I am back into uncharted waters with Rails. I don’t know what I don’t know yet. Instead I will just put in at least 6 hours on Michael Hartl’s tutorial