Month: May 2009

On the heels of Gregg Pollack’s call to action last week to give out three thank yous, here are mine:

1. Thank you Uncle Bob Martin.  Adopting your three rules of TDD changed my development style and helps me to deliver excellent quality code and design.
2. Thank you DHH and the Rails core team for providing a framework that truly delivers on the promise of allowing you to focus on the business logic of an application as opposed to the more pedestrian work (Java EE, are you listening?)
3. Thank you Matz for Ruby.  You’ve taken an old (C/C++/Java) dog and learned him some (dynamic) new tricks.

Some thoughts after spending several days immersed in the software development goodness known as RailsConf 2009:

• Uncle Bob’s keynote was not only hysterical but extremely informative and motivational.
• I enjoyed the various Cucumber talks and I believe I now know where to start with it.
• Sometimes it helps to be “old” as I knew the significance of the zip code 02134 and won a copy of the Rspec book.  Send it to Zoom!
• I’m downloading RubyMine and trying it out.  Gregg Pollack’s demo makes it appear extremely promising as a Ruby/Rails IDE.
• “Code smells” was a new term for me.  Cool that metric_fu is available to sniff your code in many different ways.
• I need to look into Webrat and Nanite.
• I need to get a github account and put some of my code out there if I want to be like all the cool kids.
• After working with git for several weeks on a daily basis, Scott Chacon’s advanced git tips and tricks really put git over the top for me.  And the cheat sheet should prove insanely useful.
• I’ve known about the various Amazon Web Services for a long time now.  I should actually try them out.
• The Las Vegas Hilton needs to be put out of its misery.