Immediate responses make for a great feedback loop. REPL shells are a terrific tool for experimenting and troubleshooting in many scenarios.Apps that are slow to load can quickly drain your happiness at development time. A fast load time is a crucial feature for users, but it is also essential for programming happiness.And also this command-line tool for another system for the same reason. For example, I created this to avoid having to use JRuby because of its slow startup time. Improving the feedback loop is worth investing time.I think testing is just one side of the problem. Indeed, having an effective feedback loop is an excellent reason for writing a test, although that is not always possible or suitable. You want your tests to be fast (shorter in time) and test the real thing as much as possible (wider in scope), which are usually opposite attributes. The feedback loop is often associated with automated testing. You are going through that cycle countless times while coding anything, so you better pay attention to how it unfolds.
#Mymind program code#
It refers to the cycle of writing some code and validating its effects. Today, I believe it is a key factor in developer happiness. This sentence put a name to a concept that wasn’t even on my radar: feedback loop. Feedback loopĪs an engineer, you should constantly work to make your feedback loops shorter in time and/or wider in scope Imagine having paid attention to those! I still carry a subtle and unjustified aversion to the term engineer from those times. In those days, I had professors who told us that our job should be drawing comprehensive diagrams and writing long documents that others would code. And this quote made me want to learn about those: automated testing, the importance of readable code, implementation patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, etc.Ībove all, this quote made me respect the craft of writing code. In a time where you could often hear that programming was a second-class activity for a real engineer™ ( foolishness that some still perpetuate today), books like this one, XP Explained, or The Pragmatic Programmer, placed the focus on practices for writing better and more robust code. When I read the Refactoring book in the early 2000s, this quote strongly caught my attention. I’m not a great programmer I’m just a good programmer with great habits.īy Kent Beck, quoted by Martin Fowler in Refactoring (1st ed), June 1999