Craftsmanship Task - Lessons (Part2)

1 month to the day after my first post, a quick follow-up with some more thoughts I’ve had doing and (kinda) completing my first task.

When is something done?

Never! For me at least, MVP is harder to stick to that I’d thought it was. I added colours to NanoTest as I wanted to see red and green - which wasn’t really necessary, however, it made me happy! I also have a delete action in scwiki which I don’t think is technically a requirement, again, I wanted it as I felt it was a requirement.

I can achieve far more than I thought I could

If you’d told me a year ago, I could write even the most basic (as NanoTest is) testing framework, I’d probably have laughed out loud…

Enrique set me and Aimee a great task, I learned so much about testing…

I am so bad at TDD.

Although I totally get the ethos of TDD, and ascribe to it, I found it really hard to test drive the wiki. That’s not to say it isn’t tested, it is, but maybe 10% of it was truly test-driven. All the guys at work have been great, helping me improve at BDD/TDD. I had an excellent couple of days on Thursday/Friday, when it really clicked for me.

I will get better

Everyday I learn a little (sometimes a lot) more. It’s sometimes demoralising when you can’t crack something, it feels a lot like you never will. Usually walking away and coming back to it fresh seems to have been a catalyst for solving the problem for me. You have to keep your self belief through out these moments.

Passive mentoring

One of the many things I love about Eden, is the passive mentoring. Generally, people offer really constructive active mentoring or input, but the standard of conversation and technical capabilities are so high, that I feel driven to do each thing better.I’ve found I often refactor what I’d thought was OK code, once someone has looked at it and said “Oooh, maybe that would be better if…”

I’ve come to feel that possibly this passive mentoring is more immediately apparent in raising my standards in a day to day way, than the higher level ‘official’ mentoring, which I feel will deliver a more detailed knowledge over a much longer period.

Enough for now

More to follow as I feel inspired