Tech Thoughts April 22, 2014
- Tonight is the first of the hands-on developer meetings – Ale and Algorithms – for our EC Tech Meetup at the Milwaukee Burger joint in Eau Claire. 7 pm. Tonight I’m hoping to work on some problems including
- Fizz Buzz
- Armstrong Numbers
- Prime Number detector
- Reverse a String without API use
- Since the meeting is only an hour or so long we may not get through all these. I’ll be using Groovy . . . and beer and cheese curds.
- This is the first of hands-on meetings to do TDD, build build servers, open source VM, and solutions for private business.
- How exactly can you do TDD whne you are using Acceptance Tests as a target? So . . .in (say) a two week iteration you start off with broken tests and then fix them? The build server then reports red for two weeks. Yikes. And imagine a release of several iterations over a few months . . . maybe thats an insane target and TDD doesn’t work on that level.
- After you release an iteration MAKE SURE the business experts review the AT criteria and outcomes. All that may have changed by the end of development.
- In DB Unit — if you are loading your data from an XML file make SURE the first record of the same table has ALL the fields even if it doesn’t use them! Else you’ll get a “Broked” error — can’t load missing fields. For instance:
This breaks:
<Object Date=”[some_date]” ID=”77″ />
<Object Date=”[some_date]” ID=”77″ ObjectNumber=”3751″/>
This doesn’t:
<Object Date=”[some_date]” ID=”77″ ObjectNumber=”3751″/>
<Object Date=”[some_date]” ID=”77″ />
- Java’s Big Decimal: Again, to iterate: instantiating with a STRING is better than a DECIMAL — but you just have to live with the non-compile time check. Sigh. But don’t want those nasty decimals hanging off. Here’s a pic of a Groovy test (compiles to Java):
Pretty important in financial calculations. More on this later sometime.