nickloewen

This is a plain-text version of Bret Victor’s reading list. It was requested by hf on Hacker News.

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Highly recommended things!

This is my five-star list. These are my favorite things in all the world.

A few of these works have had an extraordinary effect on my life or way of thinking. They get a sixth star. ★

zsup

Documentation-Driven Development

The philosophy behind Documentation-Driven Development is a simple: from the perspective of a user, if a feature is not documented, then it doesn't exist, and if a feature is documented incorrectly, then it's broken.

• Document the feature first. Figure out how you're going to describe the feature to users; if it's not documented, it doesn't exist. Documentation is the best way to define a feature in a user's eyes.
• Whenever possible, documentation should be reviewed by users (community or Spark Elite) before any development begins.
• Once documentation has been written, development should commence, and test-driven development is preferred.
• Unit tests should be written that test the features as described by the documentation. If the functionality ever comes out of alignment with the documentation, tests should fail.
• When a feature is being modified, it should be modified documentation-first.
• When documentation is modified, so should be the tests.

anantn

function go() {
  var userId = prompt('Username?', 'Guest');
  // Consider adding '/<unique id>' if you have multiple games.
  var gameRef = new Firebase(GAME_LOCATION);
  assignPlayerNumberAndPlayGame(userId, gameRef);
};

// The maximum number of players.  If there are already 
// NUM_PLAYERS assigned, users won't be able to join the game.
var NUM_PLAYERS = 4;