Kodsnack 428 - Yes, it gives me no guarantee, with Harald Achitz

Download (mp3)

Kristoffer chats with Harald Achitz about Harald’s path as a developer, test-driven development, seeing the big picture, and more.

The first part of the discussion is Harald’s background: Growing up on the far side of Europe, focusing on music, and how he eventually landed in computing. Freelancing as a developer in 1995 - what was that like? How did one find customers? The story then goes into Harald’s way into C and C++. Developing for medical devices and hospitals. Moving toward Linux, making a living as an open source developer, and eventually ending up in Sweden.

Then, the conversation moves to Harald’s increasing interest in what happens after you finish writing the code; builds, releases, integrations, package managers, build systems, and so much more. We talk quite a bit about seeing the big picture, and how our code is, at best, a temporary and unimportant part of the greater whole. Are we too focused on the next task, at the expense of thinking about and seeing the whole?

Harald explains why he likes to have 100% code coverage, how he goes about setting up his tests, and the challenges of setting up tests when responsibilities strech across teams.

Many of the hardest problems are organizational, the code we write is, on the whole, often not very important. Code is temporary. All of which is more motivation for testing more.

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund and @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at info@kodsnack.se if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

If you enjoy Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! You can also support the podcast by buying us a coffee (or two!) through Ko-fi.

Titles