On Friday and Saturday, we participated in the RADRace which was definitely an interesting and fun experience. The weirdest thing about it was that you basically have to avoid using a lot of your best practices. There’s no time for writing tests. There is no time for refactoring. There’s no time to sit back and reflect on the way you should deal with the problem at hand in the best way.

The winning teams (there were two this year) didn’t do any of the above. They had extensive code generators and easily configurable components that they reused in all of the applications they build. Not surprisingly, they completed the entire assignment and even had a few extra’s in their solutions.

We used code generation as well, but we only generated data access code, and in some cases we generated some screens as well but mostly as a starting point which we would then modify to complete the parts of the assignment. So we still had a lot of coding to do over the 2 day event. Even though we didn’t have time to write tests and we didn’t have time to refactor our code, i’m still very happy with the solution we ended up with considering the circumstances and extreme lack of time. We made some good decisions early on that saved us a lot of time, and we still wrote pretty clean code. Obviously, some parts were done ‘quick & dirty’ but i think we managed to keep that to a respectable minimum. We didn’t complete the entire assignment though, but we did come pretty close. And we even had a very intuitive user-interface
So… you’re probably wondering where we ended up in the race. As i said earlier, there were 2 teams that shared the first prize. The 3rd team also generated a hell of a lot of code but their solution wasn’t as complete as those of the winners. We finished in 4th place, which was probably the best we could do considering the competition. Maybe we could have beaten the team that came in 3rd… at least the jury said it was a close call between 3rd and 4th place. So, considering the competition I think this was pretty much the best result we could hope for. Obviously, my teammate and I are very happy with the result… also because we came out ahead of the other team sent by my company and of course the internal competition was pretty important as well
So if you were wondering why it’s been so quiet on my blog for the last 3 weeks, now you know why. I’ve been pretty busy lately and haven’t had time to post or work on Noma. But as of today, things should be back to normal so expect more posts soon :). And no, i have no idea when i can get a first release of noma out the door… there’s still a lot of work to do.