Sergio Pereira : Ruby, Community, Development

The Chicago Code Camp has got you covered

sergiopereira — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:09:00 GMT

As a brief inspection of your RSS reader will quickly tell you, it's Code Camp season. Not to be left out of this party, the developers in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas have a great option this year.

The Chicago Code Camp, which happens on May 30th, is strategically located right between these two cities.

The agenda has been published and it's pretty exciting to see so many interesting and useful topics in a single event.

.NET still dominates the schedule but there's a lot of options for developers of virtually all walks of life. Here's a quick summary (we will have 33 sessions but some cover more than one topic)

.NET: 20 sessions
Ruby: 6 sessions
TDD: 6 sessions
JavaScript: 3 sessions
Functional Programming: 3 sessions
Cloud computing: 3 sessions
Python: 2 sessions
Java: 2 sessions

The bad part is that we can't be at all the sessions we'd like — there will be 5 or 6 concurrent talks. Here are some sessions that interest me in particular:

Those are only a few of the talks. I'm sure you'll be able to find sessions of your own interest. RSVP below. Hope to see you there.

Trying out a Randori

sergiopereira — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:50:00 GMT

Tonight's meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group was led by Uncle Bob Martin.

This time around we tried a Randori-style coding dojo. The task was to build a clock and, although we fell short of the original goal of having a GUI, there was plenty to be learned in this process.

I felt it was an interesting way to learn about your own performance under a moderate amount of pressure. More importantly, at least for me, was getting exposure to BDD and pairing with other developers that are a few step ahead of me on that particular road.

Once again, because I'm not a Ruby developer by day, I felt a little bit uneasy taking my turn and going up there to code a little bit. But I would not pass the experience, otherwise why even bother showing up for the event at all.

The whole thing was captured on tape. ~~Hopefully the video will be made available and I'll come back and link to it here.~~

UPDATE: Doug has put some videos up.

Software Craftsmanship - Coding Dojo - Kata

Software Craftsmanship - Coding Dojo - Randori

Video - The Langston's Ant

sergiopereira — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:41:00 GMT

Remember one recent post when I talked about the Code Kata that I attended? Well, Micah prepared a screencast version of that Kata and that video is now available.

It's a short screencast (14') and even if Ruby is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to watch BDD being practiced.

Langston's Ant in Ruby Kata from Micah Martin on Vimeo.

Performing Code Katas

sergiopereira — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:21:00 GMT

I just came back from the first meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group. Tonight Micah Martin talked about Code Kata but added an extra facet to it.

Micah proposes that, although practicing the Katas by yourself, in your spare time, is valuable, presenting your routine to an audience can deliver even more results. For the presenter there is the opportunity to gain feedback from the audience (peers, masters, even pupils.) For someone watching there's the chance of seeing another peer (or even a master) in action and learn how other developers approach problems and construct their software. By the way, it takes a non trivial amount of courage to sit in front of an audience and write code, even if you have practiced it several times beforehand.

To demonstrate this concept, Micah created a Ruby program that implemented Langton's Ant. I'll try to illustrate the results of this experience.

The audience - me (and many others)

Once Micah explained what the problem was, he asked that we watched him code and be prepared to evaluate his performance (quality, smoothness, clarity, etc.)

Although I know a little bit of Ruby, I'm by no means a proficient Ruby developer yet. Seeing someone that works with the language all the time in action would be interesting no matter what. But there was more in it for me.

Micah, as a true BDD pratictioner, started by creating the specs with RSpec and proceeded with the red/green/refactor iterations until he achieved a complete successful specification execution.

There's nothing like seeing a technology at work to understand it better. Tonight's performance contributed a lot for my BDD understanding.

The presenter

After the presentation we had to rate it (0 to 10) and give some feedback. There's where the other Ruby and BDD ninjas in the room could make educated comments about Micah's performance and average joes like myself could comment on less sophisticated issues like font size and keystrokes.

Judging by the constructive feedback, I'd imagine the presenter's future performances will be fine tuned and get better. On that note, the suggestion is that the presenter moves on to a different Kata for each performance.