September 2012 – Anagram Follow Up

Date: Wednesday 26 September 2012

Time: 19:30 start.

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Map

It’s a follow up session! Bring your laptops and other programming apparatus. Last month we had a great session with the Anagram Kata. This month, we shall follow up with some interesting turns involving the same Kata. We shall assume the roles of developers that have happened across some code regarding Kata and have acquired responsibility of maintenance.

Trade your solutions from last month for a piece of code that you have not seen. There’s plenty of implementations in various languages in the comments section of our August post (Objective-C, Java, C#, Python and PHP amongst others). If you have attempted the kata then I encourage you to share your code for some variety. Adapt the code using one or more of the following scenarios:

1. The code is used in a neat widget in an unspecified number of ways. You’ve been tasked with making the code extensible and adaptable to change. Refactor an existing code to achieve the goal.
2. Adapt the algorithm employed in the existing code to perform ‘better’ in terms of time and/or space. How will you measure this? Can you cache results to improve anagram generation time for subsequent requests of identical input?
3. If your acquired code has no formal testing applied to it, how can you be sure that it works? Create a suite of tests. What tests are required to assure required functionality in any dictionary?

This kata is a nice opportunity to try some things that we don’t always have the opportunity to do. It is also possible to apply various techniques in producing code for any of the scenarios listed (pair programming, TDD etc.). We will wrap the evening up with some ‘show and tell’ sessions where we can discuss each other’s offerings.

I look forward to seeing to seeing everyone! New comers are always welcome too; you can pick up code from last month and join in.