Building positive customer relationships with Extreme Programming — There are plenty of points of view when it comes to Extreme Programming (XP) — anything that can be (mis)interpreted as dogma is bound to elicit a wide range of responses. I want to look at XP as providing a framework for excellent customer service and explore why I think…

Lessons learned from building on top of my own software — Over the past few months I’ve worked on creating a console-based tic tac toe game (written in Clojure) and a simple web server (written in Java). It was my first time building anything in either of those languages, and although there were certainly frustrating moments it was absolutely a great…

One of the things that I am enjoying most about my apprenticeship at 8th Light so far is having the opportunity to read a lot of books. Now that I’m taking public transit to/from work, I have a lot more “semi-idle” time that’s perfect for reading. …

A Mini-Saga of Failure, Frustration, and Eventual Growth — When trying to deploy my tic tac toe program in Clojure to Clojars, a public repository of open source Clojure libraries, I ran into the following error: Could not transfer artifact clojure-ttt:clojure-ttt:jar:0.1.0–20160803.181040–15 from/to clojars (https://clojars.org/repo/): Access denied to: https://clojars.org/repo/clojure-ttt/clojure-ttt/0.1.0-SNAPSHOT/clojure-ttt-0.1.0-20160803.181040-15.jar, ReasonPhrase: Forbidden — You don’t have access to the ‘clojure-ttt’ group.

The last spec from cob spec that I got to pass is named TimeToComplete and is located within a separate sub-suite of tests called SimultaneousTestSuite. It sends thousands of get requests to the server being tested and verifies that every response is a 200. It’s designed to break a single-threaded…

The beginning of figuring out how to organize a Java project — After working on my Java server project for about two weeks, I feel like I’d made reasonable progress on it. …

As I’ve been working on implementing an HTTP server in Java (or at least one that passes the acceptance criteria I was given), I’ve noticed that the idea of Input/Output (IO) is all over the place. On one hand, IO is pretty simple to understand. You have input which is…

This post details some of my thoughts and experiences during an initial attempt to make my unbeatable tic tac toe program run more quickly. As a baseline, for the original working program a computer player takes approximately 36 seconds to make the first move on a 3x3 board. Tuesday I got…

The SOLID Principles represent five fundamental design goals for Objected Oriented (OO) software. Although they were initially conceived with respect to OO, they are still a useful tool for designing and organizing code within the functional programming paradigm as well. This post is an exploration of the SOLID principles as…