Kata: Conway's Game of Life in Clojure

Last Saturday I attended the Global Day of Code Retreat in Zaragoza where I had a great time practicing with other kindred spirits.

Today I did a version of Conway's Game of Life in Clojure having in mind some of the ideas I took home from the code retreat.

These are the resulting tests using Midje:

and this is the code:

When I have some more time and learn more Clojure, I'd like to make it configurable to change the geometry of the game and its rules using different versions of the neighbors, will-go-on-being-a-cell? and will-be-a-cell? functions.

I did another version of Conway's Game of Life in Java some time ago which could be configured in that manner.

I used a mix of TDD and REPL-driven development to solve it.

I commited the code after every passing test and every refactor. I also commited the tiny tests and spikes I did on the REPL.

If you want to follow the process, you can find the commits step by step here.

You can also find the resulting code in GitHub.

Thanks to all the colleagues from Zaragoza!

MOOCs: Web Application Architectures in Coursera

I recently finished this Coursera course by Dr. Greg Heileman from the University of New Mexico:

• Web Application Architectures

The theory in this course was a great introduction to know general concepts and patterns that are used in web development and see how they are applied in Ruby on Rails.

However, the homework assignments were not challenging at all.

In any case, I'd like to thank Coursera and Professor Heileman for offering this course.

Caesar cipher in Perl

Reading GOOS (VII)

These are the links mentioned in this week's conversation about the 8th and 9th chapters:

1. Code samples
   • Kata Roar by Guillermo Pascual
   • Simple Pet Store by Vincent Tencé
   • Growing OO Software in Ruby by Brian Marick
   • GOOS in Ruby by Kerry Buckley
2. Posts
   • Taller Diseño modular dirigido por pruebas by Eduardo Ferro and Nestor Salceda
   • Simple Web Development In Java by Vincent Tencé

Practicing with sets in Advanced Student Language

This is the version I did some time ago using the Advanced Student Language of the sets exercise from the Coursera Scala course:


It helped me to practice with lambdas and to blur the border between data and functions.