Turtle sprinting, day 3¶

Tags: python, nelenschuurmans

It is 0:30 and I’m sipping a duvel beer. I’m still coding as I want to really restrict the amount of duplicate code that’s repeated in each and every script. So, with 30 scripts, combining 21 lines of code into 1 line means 600 fewer lines. Who can say no to that? I’m still working on it, but I’ve already eradicated quite some lines.

I’m onto my third kind of beer. Oh, and dinner is good, too! This is what Pieter cooked up:

• Like I said above, I worked on getting the copy-paste stuff that turned up in every script unified into a couple of short scripts.

• I also did a couple of bug fixes, logging adjustments and optimizations.

• Turtle-urban’s tickets are mostly gone. Trac cleanup time! Lots were outdated or are just plain fixed with the new setup. Jonas collected test datasets so that he can build up test cases tomorrow. His aim is to get turtle much more robust by using several high-level testcases. I’m personally looking forward to this a lot.

• Pieter has been beating the installer into shape all day: both turtle rural and turtle urban now install fine. (Rural needs some work on it’s own code, but the installer is fine). Even uninstalling works.

• I set up the basic buildout for turtle-rural yesterday and this morning. Coen has been adjusting his rural scripts all day to this new structure. At the same time, he’s going through the trac tickets left and right, fixing or closing them. And, as he has to touch every script: reviewing his own code. Lots of good work happening here!

Wow, I’m happy with how this is all turning out. It was a bit of an educated gamble how it would play out to switch everything over to properly released and packaged python packages and to buildout. A gamble? Yes:

• Possible snag: two windows programmers. In practice: no problem at all. Only small drawback is that they have to open a “cmd” terminal to run bin\buildout.exe while everything else is done in windows.

• Ouch, I’m injecting quite a couple of new techniques into the mix: buildout, an svn trunk/tags/branches structure and setuptools packaging. Oh, and svn:externals. We’re with four of us at this sprint. Two of us are completely used to such a structure: how hard are the other two programmers going to scream?

• Well, it turns out they’re not screaming at all. They like it. The whole process is more predictable and stable. You can actually easily find every piece of code you’re working on. It all works reliably.

• The switch to buildout means we have a mechanism that collects all the code in one place. The result: the installer also can find it there. Without buildout, the installer would be impossible. And without installer the buildout would be too hard for ordinary customers. All parts benefit.

1:17 and two of us are still coding :-) You just cannot beat the joy of working cooperatively on a single piece of code during a sprint with a couple of people. Cooperating this way is fun!