Eric Sink on instant gratification

Eric Sink has an amusing piece on how his problem solving skills have been spoiled by Visual Studio’s F5 rebuild and run option. He obviously isn’t developing test first, because if he was then going for the instant gratification of a green bar is fine.

That’s one of the things I really like about test first; you’re encouraged to do the things developers like doing. Write a test and then you can just write the code and run it to see if it works. If it doesn’t work, fiddle with it until it does. Without tests you usually feel a little bit of guilt about this (though often you don’t feel guilty until it’s too later…). With tests you know you’re good…

Note to Eric: Now that you hacked a quick fix into your pump wiring design and things are working it’s time to refactor the solution. Otherwise you’ll find yourself fire-fighting a similar bug next time you most need the pump to work. Buy a length of appropriate flexible cable, stick a plug on it, rewire the pump to use the flex so that you don’t need the extension lead. Do it when it’s sunny, or buy a second pump and rewire the new pump first, replace the existing and then rewire the first pump and keep it as a spare…