The Tic Tac Toe implementation makes progress. I struggle here and there with the proper way of doing things in Ruby, but it’s getting better. Today I had a ‘Aha!’ moment after I asked Uku for help because I couldn’t find out what was wrong with my code. He did a good job explaining some of the select, any? and reject methods of the Enumerable module to me.

I didn’t achieve all I planned for today, but I think I have to accept that it just takes longer to implement features when you more often fight the language instead of the actual problem you’re trying to solve.

Unfortunately I had to leave the office earlier today. In the afternoon I had an appointment at Jobcentre Plus to apply for my National Insurance Number. Which is needed as soon as you start working in the U.K. But apart from registering at a GP (which I’ll do once I have a proper room/appartment), this was the last authority visit I had on my list. Yay!

A cool thing in the evening was, Sandi Metz gave her talk “All the Little Things” at the BBC Broadcasting House. As Daniel couldn’t make it to the talk, he was so kind to give me his ticket. So Uku, Makis and me went to it. Thanks again, Daniel!

There’s a recorded version from RailsConf 2014 online.

The talk is about how it helps when you focus on creating little things. Like small classes, short methods and such. The smaller the piece of code is, the easier it is to understand, and more important: the easier it is to change.

With code heavy slides, Sandi showed how she approached the Gilded Rose Kata (which I’ve never heard of before). Code heavy presentations often have a boring or unreadable touch to them, but I think she did a good job at leaving unimportant things out when progressing through the slides and always focussed on the most important parts.

It was a good reminder that I probably should read POODR again. But first I’ll finish Software Craftsmanship – Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride.