Summer Has Come and Gone
Labor Day weekend finally proved to close the summer with a bang, and it was worth it. Had quite an awesome time with some friends spending 3 days down in the Ozarks partying, boating, and, well, partying it up at the Party Cove. I’d have to say it was quite a fun filled and eventful summer… Cardinals games, a week of learning and partying in D.C., three visits to the Party Cove, two best friends’ weddings, and a heck of a lot more… not to mention the drinking almost every night that’s put quite a few pounds on me. 
But in a way, with summer finally over, I almost feel relieved. Already I’ve headed back to doing some of the more academic things I love and enjoy. Last Friday we had an awesome, day long Agile Open Space at work, filled with all kinds of interesting sessions and workshops. What made me the happiest about this (especially since I was a facilitator for our version of “Design Sense”) was that all of the sessions were very open ended and filled with very thought provoking and interesting discussion.
Maybe my only nitpick was how I came across one of our examples for “Design Sense.” I downloaded the source code of an application that I thought would be a great example of “good” OO design, only to discover that every one of the domain objects had methods named along the lines of “getEmail_forPersistenceMapping()” with a comment above ranting about being forced to break encapsulation to work with the persistence mapping framework. Ugh… how nasty can it be when you have all of your model level objects tightly coupled with the persistence layer mapping framework??? Suffice to say this ended up being amongst the examples that were rated unanomiously bad.
Also of interest is that I have rebooted the Mid Mo XP usergroup after a lengthy break (almost a year since the last meeting). Last night we held our first new meeting, which was included doing some hands on TDD exercises that wound up sparking a lot of discussion and learning more about how we write our tests. It was pretty fun, especially having a few people outside of Carfax show up, and we’ll definitely do it again. There’s been a lot of talk about what we can do for the next meeting, some ideas we’ve kicked around would be maybe having pairs pair up, TDD code, then swap their code with another team to see what they can do to refactor and improve it. Of course, I hope to maybe rotate the coding with the non-coding aspects of XP, but keep it hands on and fun.
Overall, it’s been a good summer, and it’s shaping up to be a very fun (and educational) Fall. For now, I’m off to work on my Design Pattern class I’m teaching at work tomorrow to cover the CommandPattern, and I’m trying to cook up some code that is a prime case for applying the refactoring.
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