Grand American Breakfast

Eggs, bacon, hash-browns and country sausages is another great way to start a day.

The PLoP continues sunday morning with patterns for Extensible Program Design. The patterns are about efficiently representing code for fast browsing in an IDE. These pattern are very interesting and relate Eclipse and IntelliJ as well as true code browsers such as Squeak.

A Writers Workshop consists of eight parts:

1. The author describes what parts he wants the review to focus on.
2. The author reads a selected part of the pattern.
3. The author becomes a “fly on the wall”. He can listen but not participate.
4. The reviewing members summarizes the pattern to make sure everyone has the same understanding of the pattern.
5. The praise section is the part where all positive aspects of the paper are discussed.
6. The improvement suggestion section is the part where all the negative critique is discussed in a positive way to help the authors improve the paper.
7. The author is let back in to ask clarifying questions, NOT to explain himself.
8. The author in applauded for having the courage to be scrutinized.

The afternoon contains patterns for Device Drivers and patterns for Error Containment. The device driver patterns were nothing special but the error containment patterns by Bob Hammer were really interesting. The patterns reviewed were: Error Containment Boundary and Marked Data, but they were just two patterns from a larger collection about error containment. A lot of wisdom here. I’m looking forward to seeing the full collection in the future.