Dear Moose

Dear Moose,
CC: TDD

Just a quick note to say, "Thanks for being awesome!"

Hanging out with you both this weekend was awesome. I love the little test-driven proof-of-concept program I wrote with you guys. It was a blast!

I wish I could share the code with my other friends, but you know it is Antony's project and he's a bit paranoid that his idea will escape into the wild. Normally, I think that's a silly attitude, but in this case I understand. His project is definitely not something I'd thought of or considered previously and after a first stab of research it still seems novel. More importantly, after he described it I couldn't stop myself from blurting out: "I WANT ONE!" Which is a good initial reaction for a consumer product.

I had ideas for how to build a simulator for the concept bouncing around my head all week. I finally got both time and energy together on Saturday night. Moose, making objects with you let me focus on the features rather than the boiler plate. 10 has lines later and I had a loadable module. These should be Ints, these should be Bools, this one can't be changed, I told you and *poof* my module had input verification. Very slick. Then I got started writing tests for new features, so I could write the features.

Write test, fail test, write feature, pass test.
--TDD

TDD, it seemed so strange when you first said it, but I'm starting to get it now. Its getting to be a real rush to test the code and see it pass. I'm glad our buddy VIM was there to help, :make for the win.

The design is simple enough that refactoring becomes more obvious. With the minimal boilerplate overhead, it was easy to pull my messages out into first class objects. Maybe that will eventually become a role?

Here's a look-alike of the test I wrote to verify that I could build the objects and get a message object to pass between them.

Looking forward to hanging out with you again soon. Take care!

peace,
Andrew