Confreaks
15 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2015–2025
38:47 · 190K views · May 21, 2014
Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.
HN treats it as a top-tier programming talk for learning refactoring and for the wrong-abstraction principle, recommended repeatedly over a decade.
20 comments from Hacker News
These talks are a little skewed to the game/high performance programming side of the art, but still very interesting in general. Of the ones I've already seen I really like Mike Acton's talk. Since this has become such a nice thread some additions I'd add: * Sandi Metz going through the Gilded Rose or "All the small things" this video I already subscribed to her programming style and the general Ruby TDD/BDD movement, but this talk captures all the important values in a single example. I think it made my programming style no longer based on vague things like experience or intuition, but just on concrete merit shown in this talk. * Matthew Brecknell demonstrating Hole Driven Development [LINK] The programming style demonstrated in this video is a real mind bender. I think most Haskell programmers use a weaker version of this, Matthew takes it to the extreme. I didn't adapt this style, I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature.
I'm a huge proponent of this concept. The goal is to be able to build and iterate as fast as possible. Most of this is achieved when new folks can step in and understand the code right away. Needless abstraction slows this down and makes the app more brittle to changes in response to customer/client inputs. Sandi Metz had an awesome presentation about this during a Rails Conf. "Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction" this video Her blog talking more about the assertion: [LINK]
Sandi Metz talk "All the Little Things"[0] is amazing for understanding the general concepts around refactoring OOP code. It's ruby centric, but the concepts are applicable to all OOP languages. The most interesting part is the fact that during the refactoring process you should actually increase the amount of code and complexity to eventually consolidate and aggregate it down. This as opposed to simply trying to delete/mutate code. [0] - this video
That and Hammock Driven Development: [LINK] Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz this video * Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. [LINK] * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: [LINK]
Define "technical". But when it comes to programming I always enjoy Sandi Metz's talks. I can highly recomend this talk she made at the RailsConf in 2014, about taking an ugly beast of code and turning it to something more digestable and beautiful this video