Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Right. I have to get this off my chest. A follow-on from my habitual coding observation in my previous article . How many people habitually write Java code like this? (Clue: I see it a lot) public class Article { private String title; private String author; private List tags; public void setTags(List tags) { this.tags = tags; } public void setAuthor(String author) { this.author = author; } public void setTitle(String title) { this.title = title; } public String getTitle() { return title; } public String getAuthor() { return author; } public List getTags() { return tags; } } Then you can create an object an use it with something like: Article article = new Article(); article.setAuthor("Cam M. Bert"); article.setTitle("French Cheeses"); article.setTags(Collections.asList("cheese", "food")); // etc etc G...

Working as a jack-of-all-trades agile coach, one of the biggest problems I face is the stagnation of my knowledge. If you do not stretch yourself by working with more knowledgeable people from time to time, you don't develop. You may even go backwards. Prescott's Pickle Principle summarises this as: "Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered" or, put another way, "A small system that tries to change a big system through long and continued contact is more likely to be changed itself" (from Jerry Weinberg's excellent Secrets of Consulting book) Much as I hate to admit it, I am that "small system". So it is healthy and fun to occasionally sit down with like-minded people, and re-baseline your knowledge. That is exactly what I did the other Saturday. I survived a dull and freezing Wimbledon to attend Jason Gorman's " Intensive TDD Workshop " (the one-day super-intensive version of this one ). I won't go i...

Move along. Nothing to see here. public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello World!"); } }