Marko Anastasov wrote this on April 29, 2011
Spreading the craftsmanship spirit at ruby.rs
Recently we hosted a meetup of the Serbian Ruby user group (which we actually founded a year and a half ago). We didn’t want people to just sit around and talk all of the time. Inspired by the work of Corey Haines, we also wanted to do a coding dojo. It made by far the best meetup we’ve had so far. Sadly only half of the people that we expected could come.
We randomly (in irb) picked Pacman as a challenge, separated into two teams, and launched vim and autotest with RSpec. Apart from us, participants did not work with RSpec before, so we took the opportunity to introduce it. Everyone responded positively during and after the two hour-long session. What people immediately found was that RSpec and BDD:
- help to focus on only one code feature at a time, preventing overengineering and producing elegant code
- provide a safety net for making changes, which gives a nice feeling and encourages refactoring
- produce documentation, which otherwise would not exist
We realized how actually small RSpec is, when you take out all the specifics of making a web application. Everyone agreed that the benefits are enormous, but that it takes practice.
If you’re a local, make sure to follow our community blog at ruby.rs and subscribe to the mailing list.
