Small Steps (sudoku edition)

After trying out live coding at the October meeting of the Berlin PHP user group last year, I tasted blood. So I decided to repeat it with a more complex problem.

At that point I remembered some articles discussing the pros and cons of TDD in the context of a sudoku solver. Seems like there is still more to find on this discussion. And I decided to join it.

So I broke down the sudoku solver problem into "small steps" - the smallest I could find - and presented to whole process, from an empty file to a working (yet somewhat slow) solver at this week's user group meeting. You can find the result here. Since a soduko solver is all but trivial, I wasn't sure if I could do it live without creating a horrible mess. But with the help of a very attentive user group it worked out just fine and it was great fun for me. And I'm glad to hear that I wasn't the only one enjoying it.