Programmer Fred

Wait, what? I am sure about now you are saying something like “Not testing your code is asking for trouble.” Let me clarify, I do not test my code through the UI. It started about a year and a half ago. I was given a task to write a trigger for a client. The only problem was they had hit the data limit in their Salesforce sandbox. While my project manager worked on getting permission to delete records, I had work to get done. How was I going to do it if I couldn’t create records? Then it hit me, I could use test classes to test my code. This one simple thing changed my programming style. I wrote the code, and wrote very robust test classes at the same time. They had to cover everything I could think of. I couldn’t create a record in the Salesforce UI. When it was done, I had very well written code, and my tests were also complete. Fast-forward a week. We had deleted records and freed up space. The client was testing the trigger we had made for them. They came back with “It’s not...

Most people have heard the joke “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” When programming we often end up biting off huge pieces and trying to shovel them down.  We start by building. We are almost always figuring out how to make it work. There is no book that says “If you need to create a sales report here is the code…” The reason is simple, every situation is different. One company might only care about the number of sales in a month. Others might want to track where the sales came from, what interactions led to the sale, the dollar amount, etc. (This later scenario is more likely) We end up with code that is cluttered, is not very optimized, and just plain ugly. What are we going to do to fix it? This is where breaking it into small pieces comes in. In my programming, it is rare for me to have a method that has more than 10 lines of code. Yes, you read that right no more than 10 lines of code PER method . I have had programmers tell me that is impossible. It’...