Skip to main content

Exercise is the key to craftsmanship

How can you become better in what you are doing? The answer is simple; through exercise! This idea is practised a lot in software development through the usage of CodeKatas.

But CodeKatas suffer from their size. They are very small but this small size limits the methods, techniques, technologies that can be applied. To improve your TDD skills doing CodeKatas might be enough. But what about other skills? Developing on a software in a team, designing larger pieces of software, iteratively releasing software… all this and more is kinda hard to train using the tiny CodeKata problems.

Ralf Westphal introduces a new kind of exercise called Application Kata (or just AppKata).

“AppKatas are larger programming problems. They require the development of “whole” applications, i.e. not just one class or method, but bunches of classes accessible through a user interface. Also AppKata problems always are split into iterations. To get the most out of them, just look at the requirements of one iteration at a time. This way you´re closer to reality where requirements evolve in unexpected ways.”

So if you´re looking for more of a challenge for your software development skills, you can start with the following sample AppKatas that Ralf put on his blog:

CSV Viewer

An application to view CSV files. Sounds easy, but watch out! Requirements sometimes drastically change if the customer is happy with what you delivered.

Questionnaire

If you like GUI programming, this AppKata might be for you. It´s about an app to let people fill out questionnaires. Also this problem might be interestin for you, if you´re into DDD.

  • Iteration 1
  • Iteration 2 (to come)
  • Iteration 3 (to come)
  • Iteration 4 (to come)

Tic Tac Toe

For developers who like game programming. Although Tic Tac Toe is a trivial game, this AppKata poses some interesting infrastructure challenges. The GUI, however, stays simple; leave any 3D ambitions at home ;-)

  • Iteration 1
  • Iteration 2 (to come)
  • Iteration 3 (to come)
  • Iteration 4 (to come)
  • Iteration 5 (to come)
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Col...
Read more