cookies and code

The early bird price (~$35) for registration to FlashCamp Orlando 2009 has been extended until May 15, 2009! Let’s face it, in this economy, every little bit helps. If you weren’t able to make it out to 360|Flex or cf.objective this year, or you can spare a Friday out of the office, come out to support a local developer event sponsored by Adobe and Universal Mind. Lunch, parking, door prizes, great sessions, and lots of great networking opportunities come with the registration price. The best part of it all is at the end of the day, you can drive home instead of staying in a dank motel like you do with most events. Tampa and Melbourne are still what I consider within driving distance, but you may still elect for the motel/hotel.

If you haven’t seen it yet, an interview has been posted with Adogo’s very own Jason Madsen about his session at FlashCamp. Hope you can make it out!

A little belated, but registration for FlashCamp Orlando 2009 opened this weekend with early bird expiring on May 1st at $35. Fear not though, the standard registration price is a mere ~$50 which, IMO, is a significantly small fee to attend a one day event.

FlashCamp (formerly FlexCamp) is a one-event day sponsored by Universal Mind and Adobe in which developers and designers can take a deep dive into topics ranging from introductory to advanced from the Flex world. This year Adogo’s very own Maxim Porges and Jason Madsen will be presenting along side Greg Wilson, of Adobe, as well as David Tucker, Andrew Powell, and Christian Saylor, of Universal Mind, and Carl Smith from nGenWorks. The event will take place on May 29th from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. Registration includes free parking, lunch, door prizes and lots of great networking.

If you have the time available, I definitely suggest signing up for a spot, availability is limited. I won’t be able to attend, or speak at, the event since we’ll be welcoming our 1st child into the world this month, but I would definitely be there otherwise. Hope you can make it out!

If there was anyone who was interested in going to FlexCamp Miami, but could use a lower price, look no further. Use the discount code Adogo, when registering for the conference and save $10 off the purchase price! The discount code is only good until next Friday, 02/27/2009, @ midnight. If you haven’t registered yet but were debating whether or not you should go, here’s your incentive; that’s a half a tank of gas … well as at least in my Civic.

Only two weeks remaining until the event, 03/06/2009, so don’t miss out!

Overall, I have to say I really enjoyed my first Ruby conference. The selection of speakers was great, the topics were interesting, and the vibe of the community was cool. The keynote presentations were a little far out for me at first, but after some thought I can definitely appreciate them for the messages they attempted to deliver. In fact, I must admit I have always had a stereotype of the Ruby community as being immature when it comes to development and overly focussed on a single web framework. acts_as_conference did a great job of helping me to douse those misconceptions. Also, I ended up winning a book at the conference on Google Maps, Rails, and AJAX, so that was cool; not sure if I’ll use it, but a nice perk none the less.

If I wasn’t always so busy planning for the Adogo, I would definitely try to get more involved in the Ruby community in Orlando, which is definitely thriving. I don’t know if Ruby is where I’ll end up for any large amount of time, but I’m definitely encouraged to work with it and am having fun in the process. Of course, I’m energized from the conference, so I’m sure my eagerness to fail will kick in over the next few days.

Great work organizers and I look forward to next year’s event.

The conference ended with a keynote presentation from Obie Fernandez. The topic of his presentation was “Mastering the Art of Application Development”. Obie presented the perspective that software development is more of an art than anything else. He went into detail about how mastery requires practice and that a developer, similar to a craftsman or an artist, goes through, or should go through, the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and master. He shed light on a few practices that he felt were myths (e.g. – practice makes perfect may not necessarily be the case if you practice while making mistakes and learn to adopt it as perfect). Obie used the analogy of a painter and the difficulty required over the ages to work with oil paints and their respective tools. He equated this to the evolution of software development and using the right tools when building an application. To my surprise, he also spoke to Zed’s post, showing an ad from the back of an art magazine selling the promise of learning to paint without effort next to a RoR for Dummies book with the word “ghetto?” underneath. In the end Obie focussed on showing us that after the years pass no one will remember if you programmed in Rails or anything else, but they will remember the results of those efforts (e.g. – what Twitter did for communications over the Internet).

Overall it was a good presentation. The idea of walking a career path involving an apprenticeship I think is a very powerful and practical one. Many engineering disciplines require apprenticeship for extensive periods of time before you can even call yourself an engineer. Software engineering as a discipline is gaining traction at universities and with the IEEE but its true acceptance in our industry, short of everyone wanting to use the title, is slow paced. I believe our industry still has lot of maturing to do until we can even begin to solidify what would be involved in composing a true discipline (although the SEI is doing a lot of work towards this goal). Many, including myself, think that testing will be key to some sort of success, but my opinion is probably a bit naive and inexperienced, so take it for what you will. Additionally, please keep in mind that my definition of a discipline is intended to be within the context of specificity. I use it leaving room for variation such that mastery, in terms of what Obie spoke about, can occur for specific domains of software development, not the entire field. Also, I don’t think of mastery as solely applicable to programming, but the software development process. After all, the most “beautiful code” in the world is worthless unless its potential for use can been fully realized and manifested … or something like that.

Great job on your first keynote Obie; after reflecting back upon it, I enjoyed it.

I skipped the Rich Media presentation in favor of a break, so the next talk for me was done by Charles Brian Quinn on good practices when educating others on technologies with examples given in Rails. The speaker spent most of his time going over a list of 4 things (really 5) that he felt were important to focus on while teaching:

• What is the purpose?
• Know your audience.
• Use relevant examples.
• Be objective.
• Teach how to learn, not why.

CBQ, as he called himself, suggested other tips such as getting people involved to double check work, the KISS principle, and utilizing difficult examples to make easier ones more understandable. Charles also gave a nice comparison of his experience while training with developers, designers, and managers from different backgrounds. His comments on designers struck me as really interesting; he suggested that their ultimate goal with respect to programming is to get the job done, rather than understand how. It was good to hear someone else confirm this.

Even though this talk was more geared towards those who take the responsibility to educate others in the community, Charles was able to keep people’s interest. I can definitely see the need for a talk like this in the Ruby community due to its latest boom in membership and so many taking on teaching roles. Good work CBQ.

After lunch we came back to Bryan Liles presentation on BDD which he retitled from “BDD with RSpec” to “BDD for Normal People”. Bryan is definitely a kindred spirit of mine, if only in his sense of humor. He was a great presenter and put a great face on the his own approach to TDD and BDD. What I liked about the presentation was his ability to bring practicality into the mix and give his audience direction and a place to start on their test driven journey. In any case, on to the topic at hand.

Brian started out describing his own journey into testing and some of the struggles involved. He pointed out that as most of us begin to integrate testing, many of us are adopting different approaches but still writing poor tests to cover poor quality code. Brian identified that tools can help us in our journey by introducing more clear test names and concepts such as context, but we still have to apply these tools more effectively. He gave the following steps as a basic guide to BDD:

• Get comfortable with the concepts in TDD.
• Make it your mission to practice TDD all of the time (even when it hurts).
• Think of your application as objects expressing behaviors.
• Create examples of those behaviors [and use them as the basis for your tests].

He expressed that TDD is painful and there is an upfront cost, but that upfront cost is migitated by the quality of the tests you produce and the less trouble you have as the software grows.

On the practical side of things, Brian, although praising what RSpec has done for testing in Ruby, suggested looking into alternatives that work a little better under the hood. He suggested sticking with Test::Unit, shoulda, and RSpec StoryRunner as he’s had the most success with this combination. Additionally, in the questions segment, Brian said he doesn’t have much faith in code coverage tools and only uses them to show a relative change in coverage to confirm that coverage has gone up or down.

Overall, I’ve got a lot of new topics to read on, and I’m sure Dan and Tyler will be happy to see me giving TDD/BDD another shot. Great work Brian!

NOTE: I forgot to mention the most important note from the entire presentation … TDD == BDD, it’s just a matter of perspective. Thanks to Dan for reminding me of this.

Anthony Eden gave this presentation on the inner workings of ActiveRecord. His approach was a little unconventional diving straight into the source code of the ActiveRecord::Base class. He did a good job of summarizing how AR utilized the different language aspects of Ruby to accomplish its goal. Mixins play a pretty large role in the library which didn’t seem like much of a surprise since I can definitely see their benefit when working with DSLs in Ruby. I was surprised to see that AR has a built in form of caching it uses for repetitive method calls (methods being generated at runtime and explicitly mixed into models to avoid repeat calls to missing_method); I thought this was pretty cool. Overall, I am a pretty big n00b to the world of Ruby and Rails, but from the parts I was able follow, Anthony’s presentation kept my attention.

I definitely still like GORM‘s approach to ActiveRecord over Rails’, but that’s Groovy; what about Ruby? Also, what about the issue of working with legacy databases in Ruby? With a little research, Dan was able to show me DataMapper and rBatis which, we both agreed, look like great alternatives in the world of Ruby ORMs for the ActiveRecord and legacy stories. rBatis can even be installed as a Rails plugin, so maybe working with JRuby and Rails in the enterprise isn’t going to be as hard as I thought.

In any case, great talk Anthony! Good to see a fellow Melbourne-ite involved in the Central Florida technology scene.

Day 2 started out with some presentations from the sponsors of the conferences. We got to ask questions to guys at Engine Yard as well as see a short demo of working NetBeans for RoR development. Emphasis was placed on having a true debugger in NetBeans over other IDE solutions available in this particular development arena. I know a debugger is essential for the work I do with Java, so I can definitely see the benefits that Sun was trying to show; I hope others at the conference were able to come to similar realization. After these short plugs, we got into the real start of the day with Charles Nutter and his presentation on JRuby.

Charles is the recent celeb in the JVM languages world with the work that he’s done to bring JRuby to the community as well as participating in efforts to build standardized testing and set new baselines for performance in the Ruby language. Charles approached his presentation from the perspective of a developer who has only worked with MRI. He showed us a few uses cases that have been successful with JRuby and Rails including Oracle Mix and Mingle. He ran some performance tests for us showing JRuby 1.1 (trunk) versus Ruby 1.9 and how in most benchmarks JRuby was more performant after the initial startup costs of Java. He talked about the great work being done in the activerecord-jdbc-adapter project along with the benefits of using JDBC for database connectivity. For his final point, he talked about deployment scenarios comparing Mongrel and more traditional JEE servers, exemplified via GlassFish.

If you follow JRuby in the news, there was only one surprise in his entire presentation. Charles showed us an awesome gem that the GlassFish had put together to make it easier to deploy JRoR applications. I’m going to mess with the gem more, but from what I could tell, the gem allows you start a stripped down Glassfish server preloaded with your Rails app by simply calling a command that comes with the gem. It was mentioned that it’s a 0.1 beta, but the end goal is have a production quality server out of the box. Awesome.

Overall, it was great introduction to JRuby and the tools available to it. Great work Charles!

To end the day, Dan Benjamin gave a keynote presentation simply entitled “Simplicity”. Dan started out talking about how the real world can effect your applications as well how the internet can effect the real world. He showed us some statistics from Twitter around the Super Bowl and then how campaign funds raised over the Internet helped to provide major increases to presidential candidates’ coffers. He went over some comparisons for growth and overall demand in the developer industry as well as conveyed an interesting statistic that Orlando is 16th in the nation for technology jobs. Dan went on to show some examples of what he considers complex user experiences versus simplistic ones. Examples were drawn from some sites he found online as well as his experience with Cork’d, citing most of his success with Cork’d due to his designer colleague and a simple user experience. A focus was placed on the ability for a developer/designer to drive design decision when the user should be the one who is really in control. Dan has a few other suggestions: don’t release a beta, apologize to users when things go wrong, and just ship the product to avoid feature creep.

Overall the keynote was a lot different than other conference keynotes I’ve seen delivered. Most people usually expect keynotes to focus on the technological topics from which the conference is based, usually with a focus on direction for those technologies. Dan took a more general approach and focussed on good design practices in a technology agnostic way. Although different, it was a good presentation and I enjoyed the talk.