Supporting Your Code, README vs Wiki and Test Coverage

In this episode we talk about several things that have been on our mind. We find that Joe has been taken over by AI’s, Michael now understands our love of Kotlin, and Allen wants to know how to escape supporting code you wrote forever.

News

Visited with Jamie Taylor from the .NET Core Podcast, Tabs N Spaces and Waffling Taylors

• https://dotnetcore.show/
• https://tabsandspaces.io/
• https://wafflingtaylors.rocks/

Topics

Should you own the work you created forever?

• How to mitigate this?

Wiki vs Readme

• Both are good
  • Anything that is directly related to the code should be in the README
  • How to set things up, describe flows, etc. should be in a wiki
  • You can always link to wikis from the READMEs!

Should you take on the work that nobody else wants and “take one for the team”?

• Are there upsides?
• Do the cons outweight whatever pros there may be?

Test coverage

• Setting coverage numbers too high can be completely counter-productive
  • Making these target numbers too high will also lead to “cheating” to achieve the numbers
• Getting 100% coverage on a method doesn’t mean that it was tested thoroughly or even well – it just means there is a test that references the method
• Useful tests are more important than covering all methods

What’s a technology that’s reignited excitement in you?

• Joe – all the various AI’s out there. ChatGPT and more
• Michael – Kotlin
• Allen – Big data streaming technologies

javadoc != documentation

• Truer things may never have been spoken

Resources we Like

Kotlin documenation is excellent

• https://kotlinlang.org/docs/basic-syntax.html

Microsoft still doing excellent documentation as well

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/tutorials/numbers-in-csharp?tutorial-step=1

Tips of the Week

Warp AI is a (currently free) terminal for macOs that integrates an AI. It has several nice features such as those listed below, but one killer feature is that it has support for either a local or a cloud-based AI which helps navigate sticky legal, security, or company policies.

• Command Prediction
• Quick error lookup
• Integrated search
• AI prompt
• Supports either local or cloud-based AI, and they promise your data is never stored

Thanks for the tip Dave Follett!

Recently mikerg suggested a really cool book in our #gamedev channel on the https://codingblocks.slack.com It has chapters on things like vectors, fractals, celluar automata and other cool type topics for game or other graphical programming. It’s available free online or you can order a physical print-on-demand copy. https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-1-vectors/

Gson().toJson(mapOf( “key” to “value” )) https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.collections/map-of.html

IntelliJ – Kotlin Bytecode

• Tools –> Kotlin –> Show Bytecode