A half-issue to keep me on schedule

Posted by Ian Whitney on January 1, 2015

Happy 2015 to you all!

My plan was to send the first newsletter today, but thanks to a slip of my fingers* I sent it out a few days ago. So call this newsletter 1.5.

I’d like to point you towards some excellent design presentations by a friend of mine, Jim Gay. Jim and I both attendeded an OO-design class with Sandi Metz & Katrina Owen in March, 2014. He’s followed up on that class with a book, Clean Ruby, and a presentation at Ruby Conf.

Following Jim’s advice I tried some refactoring and found myself with a weird jumble of code. Jim was super helpful and generous with his time and pointed out a better approach in this gist.

I’m going to talk more about East Oriented code and DCI in the near future, but Jim’s writings are a great place to start if you’re interested.

In last week’s newsletter I took a small, clever bit of code and turned into a much longer, but easier to read bit of code. Later, I was re-reading part of Bob Martin’s Clean Code and saw this:

Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading vs. writing is well over 10:1.
We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code.
Because this ratio is so high, we want the reading of code to be easy, even if it makes the writing harder. Of course there’s no way to write code without reading it, so making it easy to read actually makes it easier to write.

Unsurprisingly, I totally agree.

In non-coding news, let me suggest a couple of movies that you might totally hate! Under The Skin was loved by many and hated by quite a few. I found it to be quite affecting, thoughtful and very, very sad. It has certainly lingered in my head. And, if you’re the kind of person who likes profoundly sad films set in Scotland, I also suggest Red Road. It didn’t get the critical attention that Under The Skin did, but it is quite good.

That is more than enough for this half-issue of the newsletter. Going forward, I plan to post to http://designisrefactoring.com/ every Monday and publish the newsletter every Thursday. Next week I’ll ramble on about Corey Haines and his book The Four Rules of Simple Design

Ian

* weirdly, vim commands don’t work in every WISYWIG editor. This causes me no end of problems.