Performing the Refactoring Kata, pairing with Josh and the pairing tour
Preforming the Refactoring Kata
At the 8th Light University on Friday I presented the Refactoring kata that Doug (my mentor) has been working on and thinking about for some time. The material comes from the beginning of the Refactoring book by Martin Fowler and other authors. The example code to be refactored is a simple video rental system with three classes: Movie, Rental and Customer. The focus is on a statement method in the Customer class that creates a billing statement for a customer.
It was a lot of fun to present although it was tricky to keep focused on both the refactoring and the dialog. It was a good experience to present again in front of everyone as I will have to do this when I present my apprenticeship challenge(s) on July 6th.
Pairing with Josh
On Friday I also chose my apprenticeship review committee via random selection. Over the next three weeks I will tour among the craftsmen on my committee. Josh is on the committee and while I was scheduling the tour he suggested pairing during Waza or free afternoons on Fridays to work on open source projects. Josh is working on a readme code sample validator. Say you have a project in Ruby with a readme in markdown and it has code samples. How can you ensure that your samples work particularly as your project changes over time? Well that is what Josh is aiming to solve and it was a fun project to work on.
The pairing tour
As mentioned above, the next three weeks will be spent touring with the craftsmen on my apprenticeship review committee. Then I will have two weeks to work on my apprentice challenges that culminates with a presentation on July 6th. The details of the challenges are very sketchy – I won’t know what they are until the Friday before those two weeks. In talking with other apprentices, it’s clear that starting as soon as possible is a very good idea as sometimes things take longer than expected. To be clear, everyone has been careful to follow the spirit of the challenges and not reveal any details. I’m looking forward to the challenges but I’m happy the pairing touring is next!