Last week, I hosted a training/workshop about “Agile Software Development” for a customer. They had already started introducing Scrum in their teams. And actually they had already gotten quite far: They had all of the basic things in place (the meetings, task board, user stories, …).

Over Christmas, I realeased a new open source project: jObjectFormatter, a simple toString() generator for java. Using it is really easy: Just override your toString methods with:

well-crafted code is expensive. good developers spending hours on fixing bad code is very, very, very, very expensive. Christoph Neuroth

Christoph wrote this some days ago on Twitter. And it sparked quite some discussion. So, a few days later, Chris tweeted:

Sigh so many reactions to that tweet that read "but we need to ship". People still don't get it. Well crafted code *will* ship faster. Today, tomorrow and in five years. Crap you ship today will kill you in the future. Christoph Neuroth

Now, you know, the thing is:

Last week I created a new contact form for this page where you can ask me anything, and I’ll do my best to answer your question. From now on, I will post the most interesting questions and my answers here on my blog (and, of course, on my newsletter).

So, here is the very first question somebody asked me, and my answer. After reading it, try it yourself: Just press the big blue button at the top of this page, and ask a question…

At GeeCon Prague 2015, I saw a great talk by J.B. Rainsberger about integrated tests. It was basically a live version of his essay Integrated Tests Are a Scam, that I had read earlier. But It was great to hear his reasoning live, in a narrated way.

I use the term integrated test to mean any test whose result (pass or fail) depends on the correctness of the implementation of more than one piece of non-trivial behavior. J.B. Rainsberger

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So I am working on “exampilistic” again… Some time ago (actually a looooong time), I wrote about some some ideas how one could improve “Specification by Example tools (especially FitNesse) and how I would implement such a tool. Even though I had working code back then, my approach didn’t really work the way I wanted it to. So I put my code on Github and stopped working on it.

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Today I had a strange exception when compiling some crossover code for Clojure and ClojureScript:

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In the last few days, I was playing around with Re-Frame. Check it out, it is awesome. Even if you’re not planning to ever use clojure - Even if you’re not even doing web development - At least read the Readme.md. It’s the best Readme.md I’ve ever read!

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Today I read a very interesting article by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler: “Half-done Versus Fake: The Intermediate Result/Mock Tradeoff”. It shows some problems with mocking a class. Then the authors conclude that it’s better to split the functionality and test intermediate results instead of using mocks.

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Today I want to write about expenses and investments and a good way to think about them. This article is about a situation I encountered as a freelancer, so it might not be 100% relevant to you. But I think the lessons might be interesting for everybody. They are:

1. Learn to think about all your expenses as costs or investments
2. Exchange money for time (if you can)
3. Convert monetary amounts to time or goods in your head

We’ll come to the lessons soon, but first, a story…