Pairing whilst coding is a lot about the social interaction. This next commit of “The Rails Camp Project” was less about a test for Round 1 and more about the conversation. As with any Rails Camp, it bring together Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers and everything they are interested in. For Paul Doublas this means Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).

Quick to grab the keyboard and write a relatively simple integration test ensuring users end up on the first round of the game when they click the “Start Game” button, Paul then had plenty of time to show off the D&D figurines he brought for the camp and tell us a little more about the game (since we’re a little naive when it comes to D&D).

Commit af7cd60

Author: Paul Douglas <pdouglasssi@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Sat Nov 24 18:26:22 2018 +1100

Test for game rounds - pended as no code for rounds yet.

Co-authored-by: Michael Milewski <saramic@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Selena Small <selenawiththetattoo@gmail.com>

5 minutes with Paul

Q: How did you find the experience pairing with us?

A: I enjoyed it, the pairing, seeing how you work but most of all how we incorporated the figurines in the animated lolcommit gif at the end

Q: How familiar are you with pairing, TDD and working on master?

A: There were a lot of new things here for me, I have never used RSpec nor the React enzyme snapshot testing framework. I do some coding but it is not the main part of my job. I write a lot of batch files. There is a lot of stuff that you can do with batch files. There are things you would not expect to be able to do with batch files.

Q: What do you mostly do in your job?

A: Not so much web apps. Currently I am changing a client over from Google Suite to Office 365. The reason is that government clients want data soverenigty. They put everything in unencrypted emails but as long as it is in Australia then it is OK

Q Given all the technology and the various MMOs (massively multiplayer online game) why is it that you choose to play D&D without computers?

A: I feel there is more freedom playing D&D with a human as a backend, as opposed to computer game play. It is like a “mechanical turk”. For example in the layout we have here at Rails Camp there is a mountain that is not part of the game play. If you wanted to climb the mountain in a computer game you could not. The game is either programmed to allow this otherwise it is not possible. With a human moderated game, if players want to do something outside of the game play, then they just ask the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM can then determine the necessary skill, health and other parameters of the task allowing the new task to be documented and included as a real time expansion of the game. So all of a sudden a new quest is added to the game to climb the mountain.

Lolcommit

Next time

There is always a promise to a conversation when pairing with developers, sharing experiences and learning new things. We hope you join us next time for the conversation and the tidbits we lear as we build code. Till next time.

Authored By:

Selena Small & Michael Milewski