Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Retrospective: Week Sixteen

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In an ongoing effort to make this chain as valuable as possible to myself (and possibly others), I perform a weekly retrospective of how the past week went (notes from last week). I do this on Tuesdays to avoid conflicts with B'more on Rails, which usually holds events then.

This week (like the week before), I continue working on my (fab) game—a game inspired by the fab.js framework that I am writing for my kids.

WHAT WENT WELL

  • Testing fab.js. I have been threatening to do this for weeks. It felt great to finally get to it.
  • Since there is little in the way of documentation on testing fab.js code, I had to figure out much on my own. That turned out to be a fabulous way to become even more familiar with fab.js.
  • Was able to test both a unary and binary (fab) app.
  • I did quite well at figuring out how to test, then going back the next day and figuring out how to do it well. Again, that aided my overall understanding of fab.js immensely.
  • Learned a bit about the commonjs library exports and require statements.

OBSTACLES / THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL

  • I spent the entire week on testing two small (fab) apps and refactoring the aftermath.
  • I was surprised at the gap between how well I thought I understood fab.js and reality. Writing tests really exposed some key weaknesses.
  • For both apps, it took at least two tries to get the testing right.

WHAT I'LL TRY NEXT WEEK

  • Cucumber on the v8 engine. I have no idea how well it will work for me. I'd like to find out.
  • Investigate other Javascript / node.js testing frameworks.
  • Get back to driving the game to a point that the kids can write code for it.


Day #121

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