DEV Community: Peter

100 Days Of Reflection (And Code)

Peter — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 11:20:28 +0000

TL;DR: How to enrich the #100DaysOfCode challenge with a "reflection surface" for thoughts and ideas?

Hi there! I've read about the challenge about a year ago. As I've come across a lot of peoples' reviews on the challenge, it seems that mostly newer developers take it up. And it makes sense! In the beginning of learning any craft, actually practicing it is very beneficial to the learning progress.

Now I wonder whether an intermediate developer like me can benefit as much. Practice never hurts, but according to my experience, at some point the challenging parts of developing something are not in finding the correct combination of characters ("the code") that gets the job done. It's about structures on a larger scale and finding the right level of abstraction in implementing, designing, deploying, and of course documenting the solution. And learning/improving in these areas - at least to me - goes hand in hand with talking about them to someone else! Getting feedback and toying around with ideas help me see and examine aspects that I might have missed about the problem, the solution, or the user. Ideally, it spawns new ideas on both of our minds, and we both learn something new. At least for me, 15 minutes of a good discussion can yield as much of a learning effect as a whole day of coding.

So I expect working 100 days on something by myself - with occasional motivational exchanges via social media channels - might be a lot of fun! But I suspect that I won't learn a lot. This is not a bad thing since it'd still be fun, right? I still wonder how to enrich the challenge with some kind of "reflection surface" that I can bounce off thoughts and ideas - ideally with more than 280 characters per message.

Thoughts and Ideas, anyone? :)

How To Deal With Conflicts While Pair-Programming?

Peter — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:17:51 +0000

Pair Programming is a technique that puts two developers in front of one computer in order to solve a programming task collaboratively. Currently, I'm constantly pairing up with a co-worker in order to find more simple solutions to complex problems and to spread knowledge between us. We each know some of our team's systems but barely know the systems on which the other is working. So far, so good.

A much more interesting aspect is that we have very different backgrounds. He's a trained software developer (three years of professional training) and used to work for a company that didn't value aspects like testing, maintainability, and code quality much. Instead, they simply shipped a lot of stuff - mostly smaller client projects. In contrast to this, I studied Computer Science at a renowned university, and - in parallel - worked for several different companies as a student developer, often on larger systems. Therefore, I've seen many different takes on the aforementioned coding aspects and have experienced - and committed - many "textbook pitfalls" myself. I learned from each of them, and I had the luxury of learning from a diverse set of co-workers and instructors.

From the previous paragraph, I hope it has become clear that both of us have very different backgrounds, their own share of experience, and quite different views on professional development. From this stems a very strong conflict potential. These conflicts are not personal in nature, but revolve arount testing methodology and coding style: How to name tests? How to structure them? How to cut our system into functions and methods? How small should they be? When to stop building abstractions to avoid overengineering? What to document and where? In quite some aspects, I possess more and more relevant exprience but he often has good arguments coming from his own experience. Therefore, whe often find ourselves learning a lot from each other. We also kind-of enjoy our "nerdy disputes", but they drain our energy reserves significantly, which is starting to affect our work.

Maybe some of you spent a significant time pair programming in their career? If so, how did you handle conflict-prone pairings like this? I'd really like this programming task to not only yield a good piece of software. I'd also really like to learn about managing professional conflicts such as these, where there's often no clear right or wrong solution.

I Want to Make A Text Adventure With ASCII Art - Any Hints Towards Libraries/Frameworks?

Peter — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 18:17:30 +0000

Hi there! For quite some time I'm thinking about making a small text adventure, but I didn't want it to be text-only. A graphic novel is also something I don't want. Then I found the quite fascinating game Santuary RPG and I realized that such a reduced ASCII art style is something I would really like. I would like to do write the game in either Python or Rust.

Now, whenever I google my way around the internet, I find a lot of pygame and Renpy references, but nothing convincing for Rust. And those two Python libs/frameworks seem to offer a bit too much. Now that I'm writing these lines, it occurs to me that I could adapt a simple terminal UI (TUI) framework for my purposes.

Should you happen to know a library that offers explicit support for story-supporting ascii art, please do let me know. :) And if you can recommend a simple TUI library, I'd also love to hear from you.

Cheers,
Peter