A Journey into Rethinking IF Statements and Object-Oriented Programming
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I started mentoring software teams in 1994. As an Object Mentor, my first goal when joining a new team was to understand each member and hear directly from them what they wanted to learn. To make this possible, I needed a way for them to evaluate their own skills, see where they stood, and decide what to ask from me based on that understanding.
One of my personal challenges—something I’ve been mulling over for years—is collision detection. We all know classic 2D games like Mario and Space Invaders. And if you think about it, the real magic, the moment that makes you cheer for Mario or brace yourself in Space Invaders, comes down to one thing: collision detection. Without it, there’s no game.
When I decided to create this workshop, I thought about all the times I’ve seen developers face the same dilemma: a product needs to evolve, maybe to a new platform or a different interface, and suddenly, the easy path looks like either starting from scratch or piling up conditional code to handle each variation. “If it’s a console game, do this; if it’s the web, do that.” Soon, you’re buried in a stack of if statements, and every change costs more time, more testing, and more bugs.
The decision to do this kata comes from a LinkedIn post by Matteo Vaccari. If you will follow my comments to that message, you’ll understand why I generally don’t like katas. Even less so the solutions that I have seen so far.
