Lessons from Uncle Bob
Those of you who were fortunate enough to hear Uncle Bob Martin speak at Columbus Ruby Brigade last Monday are aware of the amount of wisdom that can be garnered from listening to him. If that is the case then certainly pair programming with him for the day would be equally enlightening.
Monday morning when I walked into the EdgeCase offices there in a corner was a face that I was familiar with but had never met personally. This is not unfamiliar for me, I’m usually the last person to know anyone with a reputation that precedes them. I say hello and introduce myself but as he was already pairing with our friend Adam I said hi, got a Mountain Dew out of the fridge, found a seat in the bullpen and got down to the business.
10 minutes into the day Adam has something else that has to be done for a client so we look around and Ken says: “Leon why don’t you pair with Uncle Bob on a few features”
I don’t know the app.
I don’t know what were working on.
I run to sit next to Uncle Bob.
I don’t care what we’re working on, there’s no way that I’m going to impress a man who’s literally been there and done that so it was time to sponge. Or at least I thought. Over the next 5 hours we meticulously poured over the details of what I would perceive as a simple feature to understand not just what the feature is but why we couldn’t test the particular abstraction. Uncle Bob was interested in seeing how we could test a haml view in isolation of the rest of the app and frankly I was fascinated. We were looking over APIs and playing around with how to mock state for our view just so we could ensure that numbers that were currency would be properly set to 2 decimal places.
You see, it was not that the task was simple or complex, the task was not important. What was important was how we were planning to work on the task. How were we going to cleanly isolate the functionality so that we could simply test and verify that we had, in fact, completed the task. In the end, we didn’t quite isolate the view in the way that he (and eventually I) wanted but we completed the task and Uncle Bob was clearly amused by the session that day and, as I hope, he seemed to have fun pairing with me as we ran down the rabbit hole, exploring the possibilities of our API and expanding my concept of what it means to be testable.
It’s difficult to communicate wisdom transferred; it’s difficult to work next to someone whom you’ve respected from a far for so long and package the experience in 500 words or so and I hope that I’ve been able to capture a bit of it. While I may not communicate it well now, know that it was a great experience, one that I hope to replicate again and again as I seek to improve how I approach my craft and evolve my understanding of the profession I’m in.
Thanks Uncle Bob for the great day of code! I had a blast!
