The kata Let’s get this clear: we’re not going to write a chess-playing AI in this kata. The idea is a bit more humble: to write a program that can work out valid moves for a set of chess pieces. The purpose of this kata is to practise writing SOLID code. Use TDD, but... Read more
Naming things can be very hard, yet a well-chosen name can really help a reader understand how your code works. This code kata is an old favorite, one that we’ve done before, but this time we’ve added an emphasis on naming things well. The kata A word ladder is a sequence of words (each... Read more
The kata This kata was inspired by a truly ugly piece of code we came across in Redgate Towers. It had a whole bouquet of code smells: long methods, a lot of indentation, static variables, inconsistent naming, code that was duplicated with small modifications, and a couple of small bugs. And, gloriously, it was... Read more
The kata You are given a program which is capable of traversing 2D mazes. However, the solution isn’t perfect and fails to find the exit in certain types of mazes. Moreover, the current solution is messy, doesn’t follow any sensible coding principles (e.g. SOLID) and is completely untested. The input to the program is... Read more
The kata Imagine: it’s 1968 – the Beatles, Carnaby St and Austin Powers – except there’s all the technology of 2013 as well. Including vending machines. But, being 1968, vending machines have to deal with old money. It’s quite simple; I’ll describe it here. Money is made up of pounds (£), shillings (s) and... Read more
I recently discovered the JTBD framework at Business of Software: what I learnt made me swear that I’ll use it from now on in every customer interview I need to do in order to understand their underlying needs and support our product pipeline. It is that brilliant. It’s like a targeted, systematic guided interview... Read more
Writing HTML can be a chore – making sure elements are closed properly can be annoying without proper IDE support, and CSS markup often requires repeated patterns of nested divs and spans in order to get the layout working properly. There are various templating languages and engines available for dealing with this problem. Probably... Read more
Neil and Simon We founded Redgate* in 1999, and, until recently, we ran the company as joint chief executives. Simon is now the CEO, with responsibilities that include developing the leadership team and making sure everything runs smoothly day-to-day. After sharing the CEO role for over 12 years, Neil is taking time off from... Read more
In the late summer of 1999 I made one of the most important phone calls of my life. It was to my good friend – one of my best friends – Simon Galbraith. When I called him, Simon had been working for Shell in Holland for a couple of years. I was working for a... Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
