I'm at eRubyCon and having a bunch of fun.

First session of the day was Glenn Vanderburg talking about the Beauty of Ruby. This was a well done talk. I learned quite a bit about Ruby from this talk. Actually, that's not quite right - I learned a lot about the why behind Ruby. It was interesting hearing him talk about the things that he, as a Ruby veteran, really loves about the language.

The second session by Stuart Halloway. This is a brilliant idea. He showed how to refactor a project by picking an open source project and taking 4 hours to refactor the project and presented the results. This was cool because he showed refactoring, unit testing, how to find bugs and a lot of other things all in one talk while contributing to an open source project. I love this idea and am going to be stealing this idea for sessions that I do at some point. Any suggestions for a project that I should start using in the talk would be appreciated.

The third session was Neil Ford's Polyglot Programming session. One of the great bits that he talked about was that people used to test bridge designs by driving wagons across them and if they fell down, that was a bad bridge. If the car made it, that was a good bridge. Unfortunately - that's where we are today in the software design and testing principles.

There were a ton of great quotes that I could pull out but I've got just a few that I wanted to pull out. "The Brave New World - Dynamic Languages on Managed Runtimes". "1 test is worth 1000 opinions".

The fourth session that I saw was another Stuart Halloway special. "Keeping Tests Dry (Don't Repeat Yourself)". My favorite quote from this one is "If I can say it in one sentence, I can say it in one line". The main point made in the session was that you should use meta-programming to reduce the amount of repetition in the testing. I'm still digesting parts of this talk. On one level, I agree with him because as soon as you have written the same line of code twice, you have doubled your maintenance on that line. However, the meta-programming bits that he showed us were fairly complex. They greatly simplified the code that was in the unit test itself, but the code behind that one line was a touch hairy. It even got Jim Weirich thinking and confused - that's scary. I'm going to have to noodle on the tradeoffs. Great session (4th today) because it got me thinking. That's one of my baseline measurements on a good session.

Brian Sam-Bodden was up next with Spring and JRuby. The short summation is that JRuby runs Rails great and that you can almost drop a Rails app out there on JRuby and "sneak Ruby into the enterprise".

So far I have been utterly blown away by the quality of the speakers at eRubyCon. That's a real testimony to Joe O'Brien who put the conference together and invited all of these speakers.  

eRubyCon - Columbus, Ohio

Josh Holmes - eRubyCon - Day 1 (and Columbus Ruby Brigade) recap

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:54:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2] 
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