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July 27, 2006
OSCON '06, Day 4
Well, now it's day 4 of OSCON, and I'm still attending classes... the classes are all shorter now -- just 45 minutes apiece instead of the 3.5 hours they were Monday and Tuesday. I've taken classes on a number of topics, including Perl, JavaScript, AJAX, Selenium, ...
So far though, my theme seems to have ended up being testing. You see, at work, I write lots of code... we do pretty good requirements analysis, design, and implementation... but when it comes to testing and code control, I knew we were a bit weak... it's really hard, because we're short on manpower, as always. Besides... how fun is it to try to break something once it works?
So... we always test... and we catch the majority of stuff... but every now and then we uncover a bug that we should have noticed sooner...
Well, anyway, at this convention, I've attended a number of classes that talked about one or another aspect of testing, and I'm determined to improve how we test our code The first step, of course, it to try and build some automated test suites... Instead of just testing feature X, we'll write some tests for feature X -- that way we can save them and run them later.
Then I took a class called "Mind Like Water, the Path to Perl Bliss." I wasn't sure what I'd get out of that somewhat Zen-sounding class. Well, there were a number of different subjects covered -- all centered around the different perl "personalities" that might be present in you at different times. For me, though, the key moment was a good convincing argument for writing tests for your code before you write your code. You see, I've resisted this notion strongly since I first heard it... it always struck me as one of those crazy things only an academic could think up.
I'm still not totally convinced, but... (and this also comes from that class) I'm going to force myself to do it for one month. Everything I write for the next month I'll write Test-First. At the end of the month, if I hate it, I'll stop. If it's better... I'll keep doing it.
It's lunch now, but after lunch, I'm in "Leveraging Mono" , and a couple more talks by Amy Hoy -- this time on user interface design. Hopefully she's feeling better (she was sick Monday morning, which couldn't have helped...). Tomorrow afternoon, after the conference, I'll head to Seattle, where I'll spend most of the week before heading out to Defcon.
I guess I'm just all over the place these days.
Posted by andrew at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
July 25, 2006
OSCON 2006
I'm currently at O'Reilly's Open Source convention up in Portland this week. Portland was discustingly hot until late last night when it suddenly became nice out. Which is good, because it's hard to focus on learning stuff when you're uncomfortable. Yesterday morning I spent about 3 hours in a class called "Javascript Bootcamp" -- which was great for me, because I knew not-a-thing about the language... The presentation was definitely necessary for me, although the presenter... Amy Hoy, I believe her name was... she knows a good bit about JavaScript, but she's definitely approaching all this from the web developer side... and not as an experienced programmer...
For example, she showed us a typical while loop and a do...while loop, and talked about how there was no difference, but she liked do...while better, though you can do whatever you want. Well, in reality they aren't the same... Also, it was apparent that our presenter was really, really nervous up in front of the group... though she actually did do a pretty good job with her material (do...while mistake aside).
I then spent the afternoon having my brain twisted around in a class called "Higher-Order Perl" -- which basically talked about stuff you could do by using the functional-programming features availabe in Perl. Basically the class was divided into three topics: function caching; iterators and streams; and parsing -- all largely using closures -- functions that create and return functions
Right now I'm in a break in the middle of a not-terribly-interesting course on marketing to people who hate marketing. There's some good material, but... it's not as interesting as I'd hoped, and I don't think it's going to be as useful, either... talking about "The intention economy" and finding people who've already decided what they want... which is great so long as people already know about what you do.
So, that's what's going on in my little corner of OSCON.
Posted by andrew at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)