If you want a handy outline for a persuasive blog post (or any other communications medium), try the "Decker Grid".
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1. Opening: SHARP (a "hook" to catch reader's attention), your point of view, general action step (what you're asking them to do), and what the benefit will be.
2. Main body (1): Key point, sub-point 1, sub-point 2, sub-point 3
3. Main body (2): repeat
4. Main body (3) repeat
5. Closing: restate your point of view, suggest a more specific action step, restate the benefit, and end with another SHARP (memorable hook).
I've had this experience. I've written a long, rambling post that I like, but failed to include the final paragraph that makes explicit the point I originally wanted to make. Or I've found myself with paragraphs that just don't quite go together.
I used to be a big advocate for unit testing, but lately, I think they are often a waste of time. They are great if you already know what you want to make and want to make sure you get-it-right-the-first-time. But if you're exploratory programming, designing as you go (which is one of the advertised uses of TDD), then you're likely to end up with 4 times as much test code as real code that all has to change drastically once you realize your initial assumptions were wrong. At that point, it's often easier to just scrap it all and start over than it is to figure out if the failed tests are because of bugs in the code or mismatches between the newer code and older tests.
I agree that TDD isn't great if you're just exploring a problem domain. For that, I use spike solutions (throw-away standalone programs).
But I've also noticed that a lot of people seem to use a very verbose, mock-centric approach to TDD. That approach isn't amenable to refactoring because anything more substantial than "rename" or "extract method" changes details that the tests depends on. If you're finding it difficult to change your code once it has tests, it might have something to do with the way you're writing your tests.
Yeah, the key is interface testing. I have a MUD that I'm writing right now with which I fell into an overly verbose TDD trap recently.
Originally, I had a script that ran an AI character through a number of actions executed via the same series of commands that a user would use, then checked the results also through the same series of commands that a user would use, and that worked great. But then I started down this road of thinking, "I never even had my own code! Look at me, granny coding, not unit testing like I should." And started down this boondoggle path of writing a few kilolines of test code.
Long story short, most of what I ended up writing was completely useless. The most important feature of testing is coverage, to have a way to hit every corner of the code to validate that it's all still "not failing", NOT to verify that the design is behaving lock-step as planned. Which is very important in this case because the game is being written in JavaScript, thus there is no static compile-time checking.
Interesting.. .I had never considered the parallels between (technical) writing and coding, but this is often what happens when I write. And I guess this could be extended to include outlining vs. specs or pseudocode. . .for those who write code and/or prose in a more structured process.
And I guess some steps could/would apply to some "non-technical" writing, as well. And it's what good (in my opinion) good English teachers do, too. Thinking back to one of my favorite high school teachers (who happened to teach English) and my (college) freshman English composition instructor.
This is a good idea -- I can certainly say that I've written stuff that would be improved by refactoring. Can I encourage people to write actual unit tests for any code presented, too? I usually take my code snippets from a small standalone project, with unit tests and a build script (Maven, as I usually work in Java), placed in a git repository that I link to.
I don't know that blog posts necessarily are (or should be) structured enough to lend themselves to 'unit testing' in any way which makes that term relevant. What OP is describing seems to be basically previewing the post first before publishing it?
You could almost turn it into rapGenius styled annotation of your own post - comments and pseudo code read as a part of the post, inextricably linked, but separate.
This is the first I've heard of rapGenius. Evidently I was under a rock.
That is impressive, but I don't care for how "click heavy" it is. More simply put, one of the things I like most about literate programming is how it rearranges the code to be more narrative based for the reader, less structure based for the computer. Sometime these align, but often I've found that my biggest mistakes are when I make structure compromises to try and preserve some sort of narrative coherence. Something I don't necessarily have to do for literate programming.
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1. Opening: SHARP (a "hook" to catch reader's attention), your point of view, general action step (what you're asking them to do), and what the benefit will be.
2. Main body (1): Key point, sub-point 1, sub-point 2, sub-point 3
3. Main body (2): repeat
4. Main body (3) repeat
5. Closing: restate your point of view, suggest a more specific action step, restate the benefit, and end with another SHARP (memorable hook).
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SendGrid's Elmer Thomas published a comprehensive write-up of the Decker communications training, including the grid, here: http://sendgrid.com/blog/principles-of-a-killer-hackathon-de...