« OSCON 2006 | Main | I need a roommate, do you need a room? »
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 July 27, 2006 01:19 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)