In fact, I believe strongly enough in this that I see a lot of value in the interview question “tell me about your scratchpad and how you use it.” This is a very useful practice but, more interestingly for the purposes of this post, I think the makeup of this scratchpad (I’m using this term because it’s what I name mine) can tell you a lot about the developer using it. If you get very used to setting up experiments in this fashion, it tends to be almost as quick as a search, and there’s less potential for wrong or misleading information.
And, if they wind up doing this enough times, they start creating a project or project(s) with titles like “dummy”, “scratchpad”, “throwaway”, “junk”, etc - you get the idea.Īs this practice grows and flourishes, it starts to replace google searches and ask a coworker to a degree, even when those things might be quicker. When you have a question like “what exception is thrown when I try to convert a long that is too big to an integer” or “what is the difference in performance between iterating over a list or a dictionary converted to a list” what do you do? Google it? Phone a friend? Open up an instance of your IDE and give it a try? I think that sooner or later, most developers ‘graduate’ to the latter, particularly for things that can’t be answered with a quick search or question of a coworker.
#KITCHEN SCRATCHPAD SOFTWARE#
Category: Language Agnostic, Uncategorized Tags: Software Engineering, Unit Testing What is a Scratchpad?