I spent most of Sunday working on the Bowling Challenge, which was essentially a day long logic problem. So I had a very nice day :) The challenge is to model a bowling game which I took to mean a game with random inputs. The other interpretation is a bowling scorecard which tots up scores based on a user’s input. It turns out we have until next week to complete it so I’m going to branch my repo and do a scorecard version too, before implementing an animated jQuery interface. Modelling bowling scoring can be a little tricky, with spares and strikes causing scoring to be a lot less linear than one might hope. My code passed the Travis CI build test, but I’m still suspicious that a certain combination of strikes and spares in the end round might need a bit more testing.

Choosing the random scores approach meant I had to use spies in my Jasmine test, so I’m glad I chose that approach first. There’s not that much to say about them at this stage, other than that they work in a similar way to doubles and to Factory Girl. They also have the potential to throw up some interesting error messages, such as the title of this blog post.

This week is lab week, a week that traditionally enables you to revisit previous projects or research something new. However, very recently the concept was overhauled and we’ve been put into small groups to do a small task based on a previous project.

My group was given the task of extending the Chitter challenge, which is not what I would have picked considering we only did it a week ago and I spent more time on it that any previous challenge. The majority of the day was spent setting up a version of Chitter that allows user management and tagging, which wasn’t really anything new yet managed to throw up the occassional irritating config bug that stumped even the alumni helpers. All good practice I guess though. The post-yoga hours were spent implementing some nice CSS and a little bit more functionality. I think tomorrow will be more interesting and hopefully we’ll end the day having produced some cool new features!

Nat x