Working Code Podcast - Episode 023: Clean Code By Robert Martin (Part 2)
This week, the crew meets to finish their review of Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin (aka, "Uncle Bob"). This book is filled with so much thought-provoking information that it took us two episodes to get through it! And, while some of the practices in the book didn't quite connect with the programming languages that we use or the types of applications that we build, our general consensus is that most of the suggestions in this book are spot-on.
All-in-all, I'd say that our first attempt at a book review was a smashing success!
Listen to Episode 023, with:
- Adam Tuttle → Website, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Carol Weiler → Twitter, LinkedIn
- Tim Cunningham → Twitter, LinkedIn
- Ben Nadel (that's me) → Website, Twitter, LinkedIn
Triumphs & Failures
Adam's Triumph - He took a SQL query that was running for over 3-minutes, refactored it, and brought the execution time down to 30 milliseconds. For those of you following along at home, that's a "4 orders of magnitude" improvement! There's nothing quite as thrilling as query optimization! But, anytime you get to describe an improvement in terms of "orders of magnitude", you are already winning!
Ben's Triumph (that's me) - After spending weeks of my personal time building a ColdFusion custom tag DSL (Domain Specific Language) for generating HTML emails; and, then using said DSL in a company Hackathon to rebuild a bevy of transactional emails; I finally starting applying the approach at work! And, it's all going very smoothly!
Carol's Failure - She was so focused on putting together the mother's day plans (for her mothers) that she completely forgot that her son was coming home from his Freshman year of college. So, instead of going to get him, he had to rely on his friends (and their parents) to help him move back home. Of course, isn't a big part of going to college all about becoming more independent and self-reliant?
Tim's Failure - He is terrible at negotiating. And, the very act of "countering" an offer makes him feel like a bad person. In a contentious situation, his primary goal is to figure out exactly what he can say to bring the situation to an end. This is something he always wishes he was better at.
For the full show notes and links, visit the episode page.
Follow the show! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. Or, leave us a message at (512) 253-2633 (that's 512-253-CODE). New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.
Reader Comments
Love the new podcast - congrats. Leaving this comment here as I don't see a place to leave comments anywhere on https://workingcode.dev/
My 2 cents:
I loved this book and have read and re-read it a few times. My only comment is that I wish you would have spent (a lot) more time discussing the topics in the book.
For the most part - especially in PT2 - it seemed as though you were all in a hurry to rush through everything just to get it over with? I for one would've loved something way more in depth. Heck one of the best presentations I've ever seen was by Arlo Belshee and the entire thing was about how to name things!
If we're listening to a podcast by and about coding, I think it's safe to assume that we're already wonks and so the deeper the dive the better.
Oh and on that note, a comment section or forum would be a nice addition to foster community discussion around some of these topics. Or if it's there and I am just missing it on the podcast website, let me know where?
Keep up the good work!
@Andrew,
Really great feedback. This is actually something we were discussing off-air as well. I think we all realized that it would have been much better to be reviewing the book as we read it rather than in one go at the end. Not only would it have made the content easier for us to recall, it would have been easier to discuss in more depth, to your point.
It was the first book we've tried to review, so it was definitely a bit raw - lessons learned to be sure.
So, I think you've actually touched upon a bit of a divide in our group. I'm with you - I would love to go deeper on some technical topics. However, some of the other hosts want to try and keep things more high-level (which I suspect is tied to a fear that our CFML-based backgrounds will somehow limit the interest in the show). But, so much of what we do everyday is broadly applicable - it just so happens to be written in CFML and not Ruby or Go or Node or Python or Closure.
I think about the other technical podcasts that I listen to and - no surprise - the vast majority of them have nothing to do with CFML. And yet, for me personally, I love hearing them talk about meta-programming in Ruby or why channels make Go programming hard or how FaunaDB keeps transactional integrity while still being horizontally scalable. After all, it's all just programming and that's what we do all day.
In fact, I would think that our CFML-backgrounds actually make the show and our perspectives a bit unique and would help set us apart. I'm gonna share this feedback with the hosts. Thank you very much :D