Alexander Bird Software • Blog

Foundational Software Development Skills

Links to resources and tutorials covering basic, (boring?), but essential skills for a software developer.

Contents

• Git
• Unit Testing
• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Refactoring
• Design Patterns
• Code Reading
• Finding Code in the Code Base

Git

• Git Basics
• Git merge conflicts
• Git workflow for open source projects
  • useful for your first time in any medium sized team and above

Unit Testing

• Unit Testing Overview (it's Java/JUnit specific, but there are equivalent concepts in any modern language)
• Writing your first unit tests
• Pitfalls: First-Class Tests
• Test Pyramid
• Test Doubles
  • Test Doubles — Fakes, Mocks and Stubs
  • Mocks Aren't Stubs

Test Driven Development (TDD)

• concepts: The cycles of TDD (Bob Martin)
• compared with double entry bookkeeping in accounting: The Sensitivity Problem (Bob Martin)
• TDD Antipatterns
• Exercises
  • where the tests are written for you in advance (so it's not really TDD but can help to practice writing just enough code to pass one more test)
    • exercism.io
• You don't have to decide which tests to write — the problem includes a list of tests to write in order: Name normalizer kata
• deciding on your own which tests to write (with Java example, but you could do it in any language): Uncle Bob's Bowling Game Kata (see linked PowerPoint)

Refactoring

Changing the code structure without changing the behaviour

• Refactoring
• Refactoring Malapropism (refactoring ⊂ restructuring)
• Catalog of refactorings
• Exercises:
  • With comprehensive tests: Tennis Refactoring Kata
  • With incomplete tests (need to use approval tests to quickly get full coverage) Gilded Rose Kata

Design Patterns

• An introduction to the concept of design patterns
• Design Patterns

Code Reading

• How to quickly and effectively read other people’s code
  • (I find the first half with code examples more helpful than the second half about chickens.)
• How do you go about getting familiar with a code written by someone else?

Finding Code in the Code Base

full text search (ack / grep -E / git grep -E)

• I couldn't find any good resources on this one.
• The short version: learn to use Ack, Grep -E, or git grep -E to search the code base for classes, methods, etc.
• e.g. ack "FooBar.baz" will find every time the static property baz on the class FooBar is accessed
• e.g. ack "\bfoo\(" will find every time foo is followed by a left parenthesis — a rough approximation of when function foo is called.

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Written 2019-09