Skip to main content

Coderetreat


Lauantaina 8.12 Aki Salmi piti oikein miellyttävän koodaustapahtuman Turun ICT talossa. Coderetreatissa on tarkoituksena parantaa koodauksen perustaitoja ja kysenalaistaa pinttyneitä tapoja.

Koodausongelmana oli mallintaa Conwayn Life-peli. Pelin säännöt ovat yksinkertaistettuna seuraavat (Wikipedia lainaus)

  1. Solu muuttuu eläväksi, jos sen naapureista tasan kolme on eläviä.
  2. Solu pysyy elävänä, jos sen naapureista tasan 2 tai 3 on eläviä. Muuten solu kuolee.

Koodia kirjoitetaan aina 45 minuuttia kerralaan, ja tämän jälkeen pidetään 15 minuutin jälkipalaveri. Jokaisessa sessiossa on jonkinlainen rajoitus, esim. ei ehdollisia ilmauksia. Koodaaminen suoritetaan pareittan, jotka vaihdetaan joka session jälkeen.

En ole tehnyt juurikaan parikoodausta ennen, mutta opin siihen uuden hauskan tavan. TDD Ping Pongissa ensimmäinen parista kirjoittaa testin, joka ei mene läpi. Toinen parista kirjoittaa testin läpäisevän koodin ja puolestaan kirjoittaa uuden testin, joka failaa. Tällä tavoin molemmat pysyvät koko ajan mukana ajatuksessa ja parin vaihtaminen on luonnollista. Menetelmä pakottaa myös ääneen ajatteluun.

Harjoituksissa oli tärkeää parin välinen kommunikaatio. Aki sanoikin, että hänen mielestään koodaajan tärkein ominaisuus on hyvä kommunikaatiokyky. Oli mielenkiintoista nähdä, miten kokeneemmat koodaajat lähtevät purkamaan uutta ongelmaa ja miten nämä ilmaisevat ajatuksiaan. Helpottavaa oli kuitenkin huomata, että kaikki ei tullut luonnostaan myöskään vanhoille parroille.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker

"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...