[Update: Thorsten wrote a few words about our week together. They’re quite nice.]

The final week of my coding tour came right on the heels of SoCraTes. On Sunday evening I went straight from Soltau to Nuremberg. On Monday morning, when Thorsten Brunzendorf met me in the lobby of my hotel, it was the first time I’d seen him since… Sunday afternoon. Like several other already-familiar-by-now faces, he’d been at SoCraTes too.

This tour stop was different from the start: we’d spend our first three days in one city and the last two in another.

Monday

Tuesday

  • New to me: Dropwizard
  • Discussion (with running examples) about test value, cost
  • Updated xfractint (what a throwback!) in pkgsrc
  • Helped install OpenBSD on spare ThinkPad
  • Biergarten @thbrunzendorf @drechsler talking architecture, coaching

Wednesday

Mobbing in Scala with Thorsten and Martin

  • Updated my local Scala setup
  • More Mars Rover; found a small-step path to refactor Direction to know its left and right
  • Mob Programming, TDD: mapping an old structure to new, then aggregating

Thursday

Introducing ‘Strangle Your Legacy Code'

Friday

Navigating during Lisi's session

  • Talk through @thbrunzendorf’s recent story-slicing workshop
  • Observe a Git workshop
  • Exploratory testing in a mob with Lisi Hocke on her #TestingTour
  • Review the week
  • Board the train

Here are all #CodingTour tweets from the week.

Reflections

Even though the odds keep stacking higher and higher, the pattern of each tour stop varying meaningfully from the previous ones continued at codecentric. For instance, we chose not to do Learning Hours. I think one reason I didn’t particularly miss it is that I was so busy learning. I’d seen Scala once before, for an hour; here we worked in it all week, both in katas and on production code. And property-based testing had been on my long list of techniques I know I need to learn about. Now I’ve had it explained to me simply and well by Thorsten and I’ve used it enough to know some ways it can help me go where I want to go.

Lisi and me

I’m a fan of Lisi’s testing tour and of how she writes about it. The chance to learn with her felt like the perfect ending for my tour. Here’s her post about it. Next week I’ll offer my reflections on the tour as a whole.

Thorsten, Martin, and I got together Friday afternoon to share some of our highlights from the week. Have a look.