I was giving a talk yesterday at the Melbourne ALT.Net group, the topic of which was How Ayende’s Build Software. This isn’t the first time that I give this talk, and I thought that talking in the abstracts is only useful so much.

So I decided to demonstrate, live, how I get stuff done as quickly as I am. One of the most influential stories that I ever read was The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail - Robert A. Heinlein. He does a much better job in explain the reasoning, but essentially, it comes down to finding anything that you do more than once, and removing all friction from it.

In the talk, I decided to demonstrate, live, how this is done. I asked people to give me an idea about a new feature for NH Prof. After some back and forth, we settled on warning when you are issuing a query using a like that will force the database to use a table scan.  I then proceed to implement the scenario showing what I wanted:

public class EndsWith : INHibernateScenario
{
    public void Execute(ISessionFactory factory)
    {
        using(var s = factory.OpenSession())
        {
            s.CreateCriteria<Blog>()
                .Add(Restrictions.Like("Title", "%ayende"))
                .List();
        }
    }
}

Implemented the feature itself, and tried it out live. This showed off some aspects about the actual development, the ability to execute just the right piece of the code that I want by offering the ability to execute individual scenarios easily.

We even did some debugging because it didn’t work the first time. Then I wrote the test for it:

public class WillDetectQueriesUsingEndsWith : IntegrationTestBase
{
    [Fact]
    public void WillIssueWarning()
    {
        ExecuteScenarioInDifferentAppDomain<EndsWith>();

        var statementModel = model.RecentStatements.Statements.First();

        Assert.True(
            statementModel.Alerts.Any(x=>x.HelpTopic == AlertInformation.EndsWithWillForceTableScan.HelpTopic)
            );
    }
    
}

So far, so good, I have been doing stuff like that for a while now, live.

But it is the next step that I think shocked most people, because I then committed the changes, and let the CI process takes care of things.  By the time that I showed the people in the room that the new build is now publically available, it has already been download.

Now, just to give you some idea, that wasn’t the point of this talk. I did a whole talk on different topic, and the whole process from “I need an idea” to “users are the newly deployed feature” took something in the order of 15 minutes, and that includes debugging to fix a problem.