Jake Scruggs

More Lighting Talks! A lot of people skip the lighting talks, but I find that some of the best stuff at any given conference comes out of the these intense 7 minutes sessions. Jared Ning: "Ruby Without Borders" Matthew Todd gave a talk last year asking for people to came to Tanzania and help him code in Ruby. Jared did and he loved the experience. He mentioned a very useful TextMate short-cut: If you have a bunch of files and folders open in the project drawer and you click the chevron (the triangle thingy) to close a top level folder then when you open it back up TextMate remembers the state of what folders were open and closed underneath. But sometimes you want to close down all the folders underneath. Option clicking on the chevron will do that. Also, option clicking on a closed chevron will open up all sub folders. I've been looking for this. Check out Ruby Without Borders . Jeffrey Taylor: "Fast Multi-protocol XML Parsing" Jeffrey's project had to ...

Last night Matz gave a keynote entitled "Why do we Love Ruby?" He talked about how Ruby embodies Quality Without A Name (Qwan). Here's a description of Qwan . I think it might be time to retire this talk, as I've seen it more than a few times before. I'd much rather hear about interesting problems he's solved while designing Ruby or meditations on where the language is heading. A humble suggestion from a guy who's very grateful for Ruby. TDD: More than just "testing" - Evan Light Evan started out his talk by pointing out that lately we've been focusing more on tools and techniques more than the goal of testing. Testing is not the end, it is a way to help you get to the goal of a well designed application. He did a live BDD coding demo - which is very courageous. I've seen way too many presenter's brains melt under the hot lights and audience pressure. He managed to pull it off and show some Behavior Driven Development. Evan likes to ...

I have to admit that this morning I was not looking forward to seeing another day of presentations after 3 days of Agile 2009 and 1 of Software Craftsmanship North America, but almost immediately upon entering the Norris Conference Center I felt welcomed. Part of this is that Jim Freeze, the LSRC head organizer, is a heck of a nice guy who recognized me in the hallway and said hello but also that when I sat down I noticed that every table had plenty of power for computers. Awesome. At Agile there was no power in any of the rooms and very limited access anywhere else. I type up my notes on the presentations as they happen (and I notice a lot of others do the same) so I spent much of my time at Agile glancing at my diminishing power and hoping I could make it through the next session. I know a lot of people hate open laptops at conferences but studies have shown that if you give some people something to do with their hands while they listen to a presentation they consume it more eff...