Loïc Faugeron has posted the next part of his "Mars Rover" series with the initialization of the project and taking some first steps with modules.

In this series we're going to build the software of a Mars Rover, according to the following specifications. It will allow us to practice the followings: Monolithic Repositories (MonoRepo), Command / Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), Event Sourcing (ES), Test Driven Development (TDD)

But first, we need to initialize our project.

He walks through the creation of the initial repository with a composer.json configuration and commits the initial version. From there he creates the "navigation" package that will handle write-only and read-only functionality to "drive" the rover around. He creates this package and a matching phpspec configuration file for testing the codebase. He then adds the navigation package to the main project though a branch merge.

Loïc Faugeron has started off a new series of posts with an introduction to a "Mars Rover" exercise that aims to help you refactor a "monolithic" codebase with CQRS, event sourcing and TDD practices.

In this introductory article, we're simply going to describe our Mars Rover specifications.

Note: This programming exercise originally comes from Dallas Hack Club, which is now unfortunately down. This Mars Rover kata has been adapted for the needs of this series.

He starts by outlining the goals the software will need to achieve and the complete functionality to provide. This is just the series kickoff though, so there's not much by way of code. Next in the series is the "MonoRepo" section and the setup of the actual project.

In an effort to spread the good practices that TDD (test-driven development) can bring to your development, John Cleary has proposed what he's calling this "12 TDDs of Christmas" for the end of the year. The goal is to get you doing TDD, one piece at a time, and seeing the benefits.

So here is the challenge. Starting Wednesday 26th Dec and for the following 12 days I’m going to do just one kata per day. I’m calling it the 12 TDDs of Christmas and it would be pretty cool if a few other people out there took up the challenge with me 0 fancy it?

The 12 days started on December 26th, so there's a little catch up work to do, but you're not too far behind. The "katas" are short problems to solve that only require a bit of code to get working. The idea, though, is that you practice with the test-first methods and use these examples as the assertions.

Giorgio Sironi has a new post on DZone.com today with a look at what he calls "object calisthenics", a sort of ">workout exercise for you to do to flex your object-oriented programming skills.

Calisthenics is a Greek-derived term for exercises, in the gym sense. I have object calisthenics, exercises for object-oriented programming, around for a long time and saw them as fascinating, but never got the time to try.

The challenge he lays out includes rules relating to indentation levels (really complexity levels), wrapping primitives in strings, small entities and using first-class collections. To illustrate, he works through a solution to the prime factors kata and breaks it down into the eight different rules complete with code examples.