Noel Rappin Writes Here

Spent Friday and Saturday at the Software Craftsmanship North America conference, which was a friendly gathering of people interested in being really, really good coders. A few scattershot observations – my favorite quotes and whatnot are on my twitter stream, except for Corey Haines’ talk at the end – I had put my stuff away and didn’t have a readily available tweeting device. I’m much more comfortable with artisan metaphors for programming than martial arts ones.

I turned in a draft version of the completed performance chapter Monday morning, marking the first time that I’ve ever been able to say that I have a complete draft of the book. I’m hoping for a beta by the end of this week. And, since I haven’t added the links in a while, here are the links where you can get the book from Pragmatic or from Amazon. Which isn’t to say that I’m done, though it’s getting closer.

Brief update. Haven’t done this in a while. The chapter on performance testing, and test performance is getting closer to done. I had hoped to finish it last week, but obviously didn’t get there. But it’s definitely getting there.

My post for the RubyLearning Blog is now available. It’s called “The Testing Mindset”, and it’s an extended work through of my TDD answer to the Ruby Kata from earlier this week. Enjoy.

This is, I have on good authority, actual homework from a 4th grade gifted program, paraphrased to make it more code-kata like. Find all the unique sequences of digits, like [1, 1, 2, 3, 8] that have the following properties: Each element of the sequence is a digit between 1 and 9 The digits add to 15 There is at least digit that appears exactly twice

The latest in my unending attempt to find the perfect iPad text editor is iA Writer – it’s been just over a month since I last wrote about this. iA Writer’s “hook”, as it were, is an entire manifesto about usability for writers. Writer’s goal is to let the writer focus as much as possible on your text. Toward that end, Writer has two features that are unique compared to the other iPad editors that I have reviewed, mostly Elements and Droptext.

There is a long list of half-finished blog posts that are currently waiting for me to finish them, but they are all queued behind working on the book and other various life tasks. As far as the book goes, I’m currently working on the performance chapter. This chapter will cover the Rails performance test features, and then will move to strategies for improving the actual performance of your tests. The first part of this chapter is interesting to me because it’s one of the few features in Rails Test Prescriptions that actually map very closely to a section in Professional Ruby on Rails that I wrote three years ago.

I’m going to have an official WindyCityRails conference report up on the Obtiva blog shortly. Consider this the more self-indulgent conference round-up. Ray Hightower and the rest of the team put on a great show, everything ran smoothly, and even the typical complaints about WiFi were kind of muted. When I’m at a conference, I tend to use Twitter as my notebook. People seem to appreciate it, it’s nice to get quotable lines out into the community, and it gives me an excuse to monitor the Twitter backchannel.

I’ve got a bunch of half-written posts, none of which you’ll see today since I’ve been spending all my time getting ready for WindyCityRails tomorrow. So, some quick hits and things to mention before I forget… Beta 7 of Rails Test Prescriptions came out earlier this week. The big addition is the chapter on RSpec. I’m happy with how this one came out. And now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, with only one or two chapters left to write.

I’ve been working on my tutorial session for WindyCityRails (tickets still available…). The session is about how to test when you are working in a legacy app that doesn’t have tests. Naturally, that requires some legacy code for the attendees to work with during the tutorial. My own worst Rails messes are either back in the 1.2.x time frame or I don’t have access to them any more. I don’t have the right to distribute legacy code that I have inherited, and most of those people wouldn’t want me calling their code a junkpile in public.