text stringlengths 0 1.28k |
|---|
**Jerod Santo:** That got on Wired. |
**Kristina Owen:** That got on Wired, I was terrified. |
**Jerod Santo:** It took you to a new level. |
**Kristina Owen:** Oh, my goodness. Yeah, so the thing about Exercism that's important here is that Sandi in the very beginning did some of the exercises, sort of just for her own edification, and one of those exercises was the 99 bottle of beer problem... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, no way! |
**Kristina Owen:** ...which kicked off this whole thing where we went off, each to our own side, to do a bunch of refactoring, and we'd get on a call and say, "Why did you do this? I hate that/I love that. That's interesting. Hm... I'm not sure I understand where you're going with that..." |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. To round that out a little bit... So the book is 99 Bottles, that you guys worked on together, and it's all about a specific problem. When we had Sandi on the Changelog we talked to her like "Why is that problem so profound? Why is it perfect for this style of teaching and all those things?", an... |
After the call, I was like "I should have found out..." -- like, "Did you think of this? Were you just like, 'No, it's gonna be good', or did you stumble upon it?" It turns out it was a part of Exercism. |
**Kristina Owen:** It was a part of Exercism... |
**Jerod Santo:** Mind = blown. |
**Kristina Owen:** ...and people had been submitting solutions to this problem and they were all kind of terrible, and at some point... |
**Jerod Santo:** So where did you get it? |
**Kristina Owen:** Let's see... I probably -- I mean, there's a whole website of 99 Bottle of Beer in all the programming languages. |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, there is? It's kind of like Fizz-Buzz, or something. |
**Kristina Owen:** Right, yeah. I think it was also used as one of the exercises in Chris Pine's Learn To Program book, so it's been out there. It's one of those common things that's got just enough algorithmic complexity to be useful. |
**Jerod Santo:** But it looks simple. |
**Kristina Owen:** Ridiculously simple. |
**Jerod Santo:** Everybody thinks immediately, "Oh, I can do that in like ten minutes." And you can... |
**Kristina Owen:** And you can... |
**Jerod Santo:** But not well. \[laughs\] |
**Kristina Owen:** Well, you can do a simple version, but nobody wants to do a simple version. They all wanna do a clever version. |
**Jerod Santo:** They want people to think, "You're smart and I'm dumb." \[laughter\] Okay, so you introduced her to that problem via Exercism, and you both would kind of solve it in your own ways... |
**Kristina Owen:** Well, in particular Sandi was solving it in really interesting ways. When most people submit a solution to Exercism, they'll submit one solution and then you talk about that. She submitted one solution that had four solutions in it; four completely different approaches with this long commentary of li... |
\[15:58\] Also, this sort of lead to me asking, "There are these abstractions in this problem - how did you know?" and she was like, "Well, I just did." And I couldn't see it. |
Eventually, over time, we used my refactoring practice and skill to figure out how can we go step by step from the simple solution to these abstractions that she just knew were there, because of her experience. |
**Jerod Santo:** She had the expert intuition, or the experience, where you just don't. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's an awesome skill, but it's not a helpful skill for other people. |
**Kristina Owen:** It's really hard to teach... |
**Jerod Santo:** And you had the refactoring history and practice of going step-by-step, so together you helped her kind of unfold how she got there. She would jump from step one to seven, but you were like, "Let's document two, three, four, five and six." |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, and I didn't quite understand the process that I used. It's lots of tiny steps, but I didn't necessarily understand -- there, as well, was this element of like "I just did it in a way that I couldn't really articulate the value of." And of course, when she first saw it, she was kind of horrifie... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's only obvious to a certain eye. Tell me about the book writing process now... What was that like? She sends you stuff, you send her stuff? How did that work? |
**Kristina Owen:** So we worked on the problem back and forth for a long time, until we started realizing what the actual lessons in it were - both refactoring and design lessons - and then people were hounding her to give courses, to teach classes... Privately, in businesses, publicly as well, but mostly private. So w... |
Of course, our first plans were nothing like reality, but over time things settled into a rhythm. We understood what the curriculum was... After a while, we had seen and heard every single version of every single... |
**Jerod Santo:** There's not a solution that could possibly surprise you guys, right? |
**Kristina Owen:** Right, after a while... |
**Jerod Santo:** ...for the 99 Bottles. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, I'm pretty sure we've seen it all. So the curriculum got tightened up, and after a while - I don't even know at what point we've decided this, but this kind of has to be a book. We understand the content, we understand the problem really well, we've taught it, we've seen all of the objections, ... |
At that point, we worked a lot on the structure of the book. We had all of the code examples step by step by step, and it was like, "Okay, what is the structure in terms of chapters and sections? In which order do we put all of these ideas?", and then finally, there's like a final actual writing pass which Sandi does f... |
**Jerod Santo:** So is it out there? Is it done? |
**Kristina Owen:** No... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's out there, but it's not done...? |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, so it's in beta. It's six long chapters, so it's a proper-sized book, like hundreds of pages; I don't know what the size is right now, but that number is probably available on our website. |
**Jerod Santo:** She said there was like 45,000 words at one point. |
**Kristina Owen:** Yeah, I think that was the four chapters. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, that's a lot of words. |
**Kristina Owen:** So the first five chapters out of six are out. We didn't want to release it -- we released the first four chapters in beta this summer (early June, early July, something like that). We didn't wanna release it before those four chapters -- before we had something that you could actually read and get s... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[20:05\] That's a great story. I hope it's a really good book. I was able to sit in a little bit on one of your trainings, so I understand the problem and I have a feeling that it's gonna be a really good book, because just walking through the refactorings of that specific problem... I was there worki... |
**Kristina Owen:** Oh, it's so tempting... |
**Jerod Santo:** It was compelling. It was very compelling. And even as a person who's done object-oriented for ten years, I was just like, "This is a somewhat transformative way of applying thought to code." |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.