Extreme Enthusiasm

OK, so I did participate to the Emergent Design Workshop by Francesco Cirillo. This is the second time I attend a workshop with Francesco. The other one was about coaching and agile process management. This one is about the technicalities of making the Agile thing work for real in the code. It’s never easy to work with Francesco; if you do attend this workshop, be prepared to challenge everything you know.

In my particular case, I knew I didn’t know object-oriented design well. OK, I did read about the design patterns, and I did read some of Robert Martin’s writings, but never got really into this stuff. Yet somehow, I thought I could get away with not knowing this stuff deeply. This workshop changed this; now I realize more fully the amount of stuff I didn’t know, and why it’s very important for me to learn this.

And,… even more importantly… I learned to see why a certain kind of semi-procedural code disguised as object-oriented is not satisfactory; and it’s not fun. I gained a new set of eyes and a higher level of criticism for code. What I learned resonates with what I wrote earlier about “code that speaks.” It turns out I was on the right track there; the goal is to have code like Lego bricks; objects that you can combine together to obtain the desired results. Code that can withstand changes in specification, without becoming more complex. Above all, the thing I’m grateful to Francesco for is, to get back to the fun of working with software like objects.

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