173. Something you must read

If you are still learning, and would like to become a professional (or even just competent) programmer, you MUST read the article I’ve linked below.

Trust me. You must read it.

This is why.

It comes from a forum post by Ron Jeffries, where he said

I wrote a simple calculator object, not unlike dave’s, but I did it with tests, simple incremental design, refactoring — all that “Agile” stuff. And I wrote an article about it.

The program is small, and I think rather nice. The article contains almost everything I thought as I wrote the program, so it is long. Quite long.

Why is this important?

First, because of who Ron Jeffries is.

Ron has advanced degrees in mathematics and computer science, and has been a systems developer for more years than most of you have been alive.

He is probably the most prolific web author in the Agile software space, on news groups and mailing lists, and a frequent speaker and trainer at Agile software development conferences, including attending and speaking all of those conferences in the US and some of the ones in Europe. He is one of the 17 original authors and signatories of the Agile Manifesto.

So Ron is a very experienced programmer, and we can all learn a lot from him.

Second, because Ron has written a Codea program (for a calculator), using Agile principles. To my knowledge, this is the first time someone has demonstrated these principles using Codea.

Third, because he wrote up the whole process extremely fully in a very long article (leave yourself a quiet hour to read it).

You won’t get a better chance to see inside the working process of a highly experienced Agile programmer.

So ….

Here’s a link to the article

And if you have some spare dollars, get hold of the book Clean Code (by Rob Martin), which Ron recommends as an excellent guide to writing good (Agile) code. I’m reading it at the moment, and enjoying it.

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