RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things by Sandi Metz

One of the many great takeaways from Sandi Metz's talk at Railsconf 2014: "Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction." ▶ this video Worth watching in its entirety, but the quote is from ~13:59 in that video.

"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction." — Sandi Metz ( ▶ this video ) This talk by her is one of my favorites ever. Her ideas definitely made me a better programmer.

I'm a huge proponent of this concept. The goal is to be able to build and iterate as fast as possible. Most of this is achieved when new folks can step in and understand the code right away. Needless abstraction slows this down and makes the app more brittle to changes in response to customer/client inputs. Sandi Metz had an awesome presentation about this during a Rails Conf. "Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction" ▶ this video Her blog talking more about the assertion: link

Define "technical". But when it comes to programming I always enjoy Sandi Metz's talks. I can highly recomend this talk she made at the RailsConf in 2014, about taking an ugly beast of code and turning it to something more digestable and beautiful ▶ this video

These talks are a little skewed to the game/high performance programming side of the art, but still very interesting in general. Of the ones I've already seen I really like Mike Acton's talk. Since this has become such a nice thread some additions I'd add: * Sandi Metz going through the Gilded Rose or "All the small things" ▶ this video I already subscribed to her programming style and the general Ruby TDD/BDD movement, but this talk captures all the important values in a single example. I think it made my programming style no longer based on vague things like experience or intuition, but just on concrete merit shown in this talk. * Matthew Brecknell demonstrating Hole Driven Development link The programming style demonstrated in this video is a real mind bender. I think most Haskell programmers use a weaker version of this, Matthew takes it to the extreme. I didn't adapt this style, I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature.

That and Hammock Driven Development: link Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz ▶ this video * Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. link * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: link

Sandi Metz talk "All the Little Things"[0] is amazing for understanding the general concepts around refactoring OOP code. It's ruby centric, but the concepts are applicable to all OOP languages. The most interesting part is the fact that during the refactoring process you should actually increase the amount of code and complexity to eventually consolidate and aggregate it down. This as opposed to simply trying to delete/mutate code. [0] - ▶ this video

I _really_ struggled to not use contrived examples when teaching OOP. It was very hard because you don't really need it until your application becomes non-trivial so I see why all the college classes use cars & trucks or whatever. I think I ended up going with a Player API with tapes, records, CDs etc. Some could skip, others only fast-forward. I was still unhappy with it, but it was better than most examples. I like to point folks at writing an IntelliJ plugin. I find that some of the best architected OOP programs become nothing but a collection of plugin interfaces and base classes. But you really need to understand "is a" vs "has a", not burn your base class, let architecture emerge following the rule of 3, rather than quickly jumping on the wrong abstraction to fight duplication. Sandi Metz really says it better than I can: ▶ this video

I don't have a full 'LeetCode' style example, but the Gilded Rose Kata teaches me something every time I try it. Original Kata: link Sandi Metz's Take: ▶ this video

Sandi mentions this during a talk she gave on refactoring a few years ago. [0] It’s a great little video for showing junior developers how a messy bit of code can be cleaned up with a few well chosen OOP patterns (and a set of unit tests to cover your ass). [0] ▶ this video

This line of discussion reminds me of a great quote by Sandi Metz, who's pretty well known in the ruby community for harping on the topic. One thing I saw in a talk of hers that really stuck with me: Repetition is preferable to the wrong abstraction. The first thing that's drilled into a new programmer is DRY. It's easy to understand and it works reasonably well. The next step up seems to be knowing when _not_ to roll stuff up, and how to tell when you're looking at a distinct piece of logic that needs to be reified into it's own entity or function. EDIT: The Sandi Metz talk I mentioned: ▶ this video

You may enjoy Practical Object Oriented Design with Ruby by Sandi Metz. Speaks about OO software design in very clear and easy to grasp way. I often share it with non-ruby devs because it’s about design much more than it is about ruby. Here are a couple of talks by the author which examplify her style of thinking and approaching problems. link ▶ this video