Kitchen Testing

~ Kitchen Testing Can Be Like This ~

Once in a while when chatting about working with mods, I'll use the term, "kitchen testing". It's just one of my folksy sayings that's come about over the years. What I mean by "kitchen testing" is learning by trial-an-error; just do something and see what happens.

Many years ago, the author of a houseplant-tips book that I was reading, referred to his tips and techniques as "kitchen tested". (If I recall correctly, the book was "Mohter Earth's Hassle-Free Indoor Plant Book" by Lynn and Joel Rapp.) From reading the book and the way I grew up, I understood that "kitchen tested" meant learning by trial-and-error with simple experiments done in the kitchen.

No fancy apparatus, no sensitive scientific instruments, no framed PhD diplomas; just a terracotta pot, potting soil, a houseplant, and water.

What I know about working with mods for Minetest doesn't come from a fancy education but from "kitchen testing".

Pick a mod, open it's code in a text editor, change some stuff, load the mod into Minetest and see what happens. Then take note of the outcome, try something different in the mod's code, rinse-and-repeat the process. I may not know how and why something does what it does but I learn what works and what doesn't.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to take notes during this process and to put them into the code as comments. Your notes will help you and others in the future. Don't worry about cluttering-up the code with your comments. Computer code by its very nature is cryptic and arcane to the average person. Comments in code can be the interpreters and translators for us non-geeks. "Kitchen testing" is about keeping things simple to understand and code comments can go a long way to help that.

So, in the end, even though kitchen testing may not be fancy and scientific (though there are times when I do feel like a mad scientist), it is still learning by trying things out and experimenting with ideas and what-ifs.



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