Francesc and I are working on a pet project to learn a bit of ClojureScript.
We have a very small amount of time to work on it during the week (two hours and a half at most), so we try to make that remote pairing time as productive and fun as possible.
figwheel and the re-frame framework are helping us a lot to achieve that. On one hand, the re-frame framework makes it beautifully simple to work with state and events. On the other hand, figwheel allows a Live interactive programming experience.
We work remotely in small spikes in which we usually start with a hardcoded view and then give it behavior step by step while, thanks to figwheel, we can instantly see the resulting view on the browser and interact with it.
Live interactive programming with figwheel is not only a lot of fun but it also gives you a very quick feedback on what you’re doing.
Once these spikes are working we extract all the new behavior that we consider non-view related from the view and put it in a separated name space. This makes our views as dumb as possible (à la Passive View pattern).
Then we stabilize and document the extracted behavior writing tests for it. This protects us against regressions in the code and makes us reflect on what we did during the spike. Many times we had found better names or different ways to arrange the code during this stabilization phase.
This flow of live interactive spiking with figwheel and the ClojureScript REPL, and then stabilization through dumbing views and testing the extracted logic is making us enjoy GUI programming a lot.
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