A week ago, we held another Schneide Dev Brunch. The Dev Brunch is a regular brunch on a sunday, only that all attendees want to talk about software development and various other topics. If you bring a software-related topic along with your food, everyone has something to share. The brunch was very well-attended this time. We had bright sunny weather and used our roof garden to catch some sunrays. There were lots of topics and chatter, so let me try to summarize a few of them:
Introduction to Dwarf Fortress
The night before the Dev Brunch, we held another Schneide event, an introduction to the sandbox-type simulation game “Dwarf Fortress“. The game thrives on its dichotomy of a ridiculous depth of details (like simulating the fate of every sock in the game) and a general breadth of visualization, where every character of ASCII art can mean at least a dozen things, depending on context. If you can get used to the graphics and the rather crude controls, it will probably fascinate you for a long time. It fascinated us that night a lot longer than anticipated, but we finally managed to explore the big underground cave we accidentally spudded while digging for gold (literally).
Refactoring Golf
A week before the Dev Brunch, we held yet another Schneide event, a Refactoring Golf contest. Don’t worry, this was a rather coincidental clustering of appointments. This event will have its own blog entry soon, as it was really surprising. We used the courses published by Angel Núñez Salazar and Gustavo Quiroz Madueño and only translated their presentation. We learned that every IDE has individual strongpoints and drawbacks, even with rather basic usage patterns. And we learned that being able to focus on the “way” (the refactorings) instead of the “goal” (the final code) really shifts perception and frees your thoughts. But so little time! When was real golf ever so time-pressured? It was lots of fun.
Grails: the wrong abstraction?
The discussion soon drifted to the broad topic of web application frameworks and Grails in particular. We discussed its inability to “protect” the developer from the details of HTTP and HTML imperfection and compared it to other solutions like Qt’s QML, JavaFX or EMF. Soon, we revolved around AngularJS and JAX-RS. I’m not able to fully summarize everything here, but one sentence sticks out: “AngularJS is the Grails for Javascript developers”.
Another interesting fact is that we aren’t sure which web application framework we should/would/might use for our next project. Even “write your own” seemed a viable option. How history repeats itself!
If you have to pick a web application framework today, you might want to listen to Matt Raibel of AppFuse fame for a while. Also, there is the definition of ROCA-style frameworks out there.
There were a few more mentions of frameworks like RequireJS, leading to Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD)-styled systems. All in all, the discussion was very inspiring to look at tools and frameworks that might not cross your path on other occassions.
Principle of Mutual Oblivion
The “Principle of Mutual Oblivion” or PoMO is an interesting way to think about dependencies between software components. The blog entries are german language only yet. We discussed the approach for a bit and could see how it leads to “one tool for one job”. But we could also see drawbacks if applied to larger projects. Interesting, nonetheless.
Kanban
We also discussed the project management process Kanban for a while. The best part of the discussion was the question “why Kanban?” and the answer “it has fewer rules than SCRUM”. It is astonishing how processes can produce frustration, or perhaps more specific, uncover frustration.
Object Calisthenics workshops
Yet another workshop report, this time from two identical workshops applying the Object Calisthenics rules to a limited programming task. The participants were students that just learned about the rules. This might also be worked up into a full blog entry, because it was very insightful to watch both workshops unfold. The first one ended in cathartic frustration while the second workshop was concluded with joy about working programs. To circumvent the restraining rules of the Object Calisthenics, the approach used most of the time was to move the problem to another class. Several moves and numerous classes later, the rules still formed an inpenetrable barrier, but the code was bloated beyond repair.
Epilogue
As usual, the Dev Brunch contained a lot more chatter and talk than listed here. The high number of attendees makes for an unique experience every time. We are looking forward to the next Dev Brunch at the Softwareschneiderei. And as always, we are open for guests and future regulars. Just drop us a notice and we’ll invite you over next time.
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