I went to two tutorial tracks yesterday, Refactoring Your Rails Application and Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source.
Refactoring Your Rails Application
Refactoring Your Rails Application was good presentation by Zach Dennis and Drew Colthorp. It was great to see how some advanced Rails developers do some advanced refactorings but I got lost as they rushed through the examples. I’m still on a 1.6 GHz Pentium M so RSpec doesn’t run as fast as on the shiny MacBooks. I think the best benefit is the 70 page PDF they sent out that has details about doing several more refactorings. I’ll be using it later to clean up some of my old code.
Refactotum: Contributing to Open Source
I really enjoyed this session. I didn’t know going into it but a Refactotum is basically a large peer programming event where code is written for Open Source projects. So for about half the session the presentors talked about using several tools to check Rails code for areas that need improvement and used the other half to go around and help everyone try to create a patch for an Open Source Rails project. One thing I really learned was: you don’t have to contribute by sending in a new feature or bug fix, often some additional unit tests or refactoring is a much needed contribution.
Some tools they talked about:
Friday Schedule
Today’s schedule is going to be a lot more busy, since this is the first day of the real conference. If you are going to any of the events or sessions below, check for me there:
- 9:15am – 10:15am Joel Spolsky keynote
- 10:45am – 11:35am Entrepreneurs On Rails
- 11:45am – 12:35pm Hosting and the Woes
- 1:50pm – 2:40pm Faster, Better, ORM with DataMapper
- 2:50pm – 3:40pm The Profitable Programmer: Creating Successful Side Projects
- 4:25pm – 5:15pm Microapps for Fun and
profit - 7:40pm – 8:00pm Ruby Heroes Award Ceremony
- 8:00pm – 9:00pm David Heinemeier Hansson keynote
Eric