In January 2003, I attended a Writing Better Code summit in Portland, Oregon, organized by Scott Meyers and Bruce Eckel. At the three-day summit, 15 people gathered to discuss code quality and how they could improve it. Throughout this discussion, one theme was clear: good code is written by good programmers. Therefore, one great way to improve the code quality within an organization is to hire better programmers. The trouble is, recognizing a good programmer among a pool of job applicants is not easy.
Finding good programmers is hard because good programming is dependent on much more than just knowledge of programming language syntax. You need someone who, despite wearing striped pants with a polka dot shirt, has a good sense of taste in OO design. You need someone who is creative enough to find innovative solutions to problems, yet anal retentive enough to always line up their curly braces. You need someone who is humble enough to be open to suggestions for improvement, but arrogant enough to stand firm and provide leadership when they are the best person to provide it. How can you tell all this about a stranger by spending 30 minutes with them in a conference room?
The final morning of the Writing Better Code summit, Bruce Eckel announced he was "hijacking" the meeting. Bruce wanted each person at the table to share his or her interview techniques. He wanted to know how we recognize a good programmer in an interview. In this article, I highlight some interview techniques discussed that morning.
Artima SuiteRunner is a free open source testing toolkit for Java released under the Open Software License. You can use this tool with JUnit to run existing JUnit test suites, or standalone to create unit and conformance tests for Java APIs.
One advantage of using Artima SuiteRunner to run your JUnit tests is Artima SuiteRunner's reporter architecture. A reporter is an object that collects test results and presents them in some way to users. Artima SuiteRunner includes several build-in configurable reporters that can write to the standard error and output streams, files, and a graphical user interface. But Artima SuiteRunner also supports custom reporters. If you want to present results of tests in a different way, such as HTML, email, database, or log files, you can create your own custom reporter that presents results in those ways. This tutorial will show you how to create a custom reporter, using as an example a custom reporter that formats test results in XML.
Python creator Guido van Rossum says, "I'm an email junky. I've received many emails from both experienced and beginning Python users. Their suggestions register in my brain, and at some point, manifest into a better design decision."
Here's another excerpt from this Artima.com article:
In the early days I was fairly quick to adopt new ideas, and then I realized the community was growing and that meant more and more contributions. I had to be more selective. My first step was always saying no. Then, if people didn't take no for an answer, I would ask for arguments. Why do you think this is useful not just for you but for a large number of Python users?
If you are writing one particular approach for a popular application area, but there are lots of different ways of doing it, I won't put your particular way in the standard library if I can help it. But if there's one obvious way, clearly one best approach, I'm much more likely to put it into the standard library.
