12 January 2006

Short memory problem

My pair programming partner always complaint that I have bad short memory.

Is it because of my foods? :D

After read article, 12 Steps to Better Code, point #8, I guess I found the right answer.

... Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

5 comments:

Ikhwan Hayat said...

Salam..

Pair programming? Wow, ur using extreme programming is it? So how is it? OK? Really wanna hear about real-life XP experience.. whether OK or not..

Foobaz said...

Then tell me your XP experience

Ikhwan Hayat said...

err, i'm asking u :)
i got no experience in XP ..

Foobaz said...

Oh ok, my mistake.

I know most of my sql after do pair programming for a project. Initially I just know the select statement, now I can do update, delete, join, subquery, ..., etc for the sql. Luckily my partner really patient girl (still answer me although ask repeatedly same stupid questions). I also know many command line tricks when pair with other guy (pipe, grep, xargs, cut, sed, ...). These are 2 things that I benefit most from pair programming. Pair programming=2 person, 1 computer, 1 monitor, 1 keyboard.

Test driven development is really useful for me. I used it when develop a java program since it quite easy to setup and integrated properly with the IDE, eclipse. But quite hard to setup for my real life php application.

Refactor Mercilessly. I spent time to polish my code and I believe the good OO design (design pattern) will make my code reusable and easy to maintain.

Conclusion. XP works for me, but in certain time I have to violate the rules when the magic words come, "due date".

Ikhwan Hayat said...

Wow, nice.. I really wanna try pair programming and TDD.. Nobody at my place knows them. Heck, i dont think they even heard about XP.

Works for eh.. I guess it really helps to have a cute partner like that ;)