metal&gin | (a weblog by craig t mackenzie)

So yesterday was my first day at RailsConf, it was great. The day was broken into two tutorial sessions with a break for lunch.

Intro to Test Driven Development with Rails

This tutorial was awesome, presented by David Chelimsky this really helped to solidify my understanding of TDD, as well as touching on and clarifying some aspects of Rspec.

The pace was good and the tutorial didn’t seem long enough, there was lots of good discussion and the code examples were great.

Part of the tutorial featured us “Pair Programming” (a practice from eXtreme Programming (XP)) The basic concept is one person writes a failing test, then the next writes just enough code to pass that test, then writes a another failing test for the previous person to fix, gradually the code is written and tested and passing mechanisms are refactored into useful clean code.

It was a really great exercise and provided a lot of value.

Harnessing Capistrano

The second tutorial of the day was presented by Jamis Buck, the creator of Capistrano and core member that works at 37 Signals.

I was really looking forward to this tutorial and although offered a lot of insight into the new feature of Capistrano 2.0, it was a little slow and dry.

I guess it’s kind of difficult to get excited about something without having a hands on experiance (there was no code writing in this tutorial) but it definitely left me with some ideas.

The day ended with Dan Tripp, Ant (another brit from Birmingham) and myself having dinner, drinking beer and talking g33k in a mexican joint downtown.