#wicked good ruby

[compexplicita]

É assim que se abre uma conferência!

[brentraines]

Wicked Good Ruby Conf 2013 Presentations and Videos

Slides:

Hacking your Home with Ruby by Justin Campbell

Ruby: The Next Generation by Mark Sobkowicz

Supercharging ActiveRecord with PostgreSQL by Dan McClain

MRI Magic Tricks by Charlie Somerville

Bloom: A Language for Disorderly Distributed Programming by Christopher Meiklejohn

What Even is an Erlang? by Christopher Meiklejohn

Integrating Angular.js with Rails by Jonathan Linowes

Writing DSLs with Parslet by Jason Garber

Active Record is Still Magical by Neeraj Singh

Dissecting Ruby with Ruby by Richard Schneeman

Using Ruby to Automate your Life  (Gist) by Seth Vargo

Rails Sojourn: One Man's Journey by Mike Desjardins

RubyMotion: Under the Hood by Joshua Ballanco

Naming is Hard by Jon Yurek

Machine Learning by Bryan Liles

Videos:

Wicked Good Ruby Conf 2013 Presentation Videos on Confreaks.com

Blog Posts:

Wicked Good Wrap Up by Michael Denomy

Thoughts on Wicked Good Ruby by EKH

Don't Play Football with a Basketball by Wyatt Greene

Wicked Good Ruby From a Newb's Perspective by Brent Raines

leaps || bounds: Wicked Good Ruby Conf Roundup by Mike Leone

[brentraines]

Wicked Good Ruby From a Newb's Perspective

The Wicked Good Ruby Conference this weekend was awesome! I had a blast meeting some amazing new people and learned a lot . There were so many great presentations it was hard to choose which ones to attend. This is going to be a long post, so I’ll get straight to the good stuff.

Here are some of the key points I took away from this weekend’s presentations:

Dan Sharp – DRYing up RSpec

Don’t DRY too early, wait for duplication before you undupe

Don’t sacrifice readability or understandability

Don’t start with shared examples until your tests are green

Use names that read well

Use described_class (describe MyClass do)

Pass in vars for more customization

Alex Rothenberg – Using Ruby to write Integration Tests for your iOS Apps

Calaba.sh – Capybara for mobile apps (both Android and iOS); supports Cucumber

Bradley Sheehan – Becoming a Developer

Very interesting talk on attending G School and being able to now call himself a “developer”. Discussed the concept of "Shoshin", a beginner's mind. In a beginner's mind, there are more possibilities.

Sean Hussey – Know your Audience

"When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory."

- Bertrand Russell, 10 Commandments of teaching

Know your audience

Think about what they want to hear

Talk to their concerns

Prepare to be wrong anyway

Matt Aimonetti – Wicked Bad Ruby

There is no bad Ruby, so there must also be no good Ruby.

Good & bad belong in religion, philosophy, and ethics.

The keys to writing code that works:

Define your expected outcome

Evaluate the solutions

Implement

Re-evaluate

“Don’t write code, materialize ideas”

Joshua Ballanco – RubyMotion: Under the Hood

RubyMotion uses ruby to build native apps for iOS and OS X. It interfaces directly with Obj-C libraries, and is a CLI based build system.

MacRuby:

Intended to be implementation of Ruby 2.0 for OS X

Target rubyspec compliance

JIT (just in time) or AOT (ahead of time) compiled

Uses libauto for garbage Collection

RubyMotion:

Descendant of MacRuby

Static Compiled

Retain/release reference counting, instead of garbage collecting

Rubymotion objects are Obj-C objects

Jon Yurek – Naming is Hard

Don’t name something for what it does, name it for why it’s there.

Reveal your intentions

Be specific

Less specific to more specific as you go down

Document your documentation

A test’s name should be its justification

Dan Sharp – Killing Fibonacci

Dan talked about his path to enlightenment from Dan ’05 to Dan ’13 and learning the value of testing. Here are his 10 tips for learning to test properly and using testing to create a good product.

Have courage, conquer the fear – Start writing tests now

Find your peace (find your green) – Get your current tests to pass, and then move on

Baby steps first – MVT (minimum value test)

Stay focused

Find your rhythm

Tension vs. peace

Minimize the red time

Listen to your tests

Know your domain

Refactor from green – Don’t start refactoring with failing tests

Behavior, not implementation

Let your TDD’ing be exploration… discovery

Be tenacious

Don’t write code… create software

Dan McClain – Supercharging ActiveRecord with PostgreSQL

Excellent talk about Rails 4 support using advanced data types in PostgreSQL. I took a lot of notes, but I would recommend doing some research on your own if you are really interested in this topic. There was a ton of information, but Dan gave a great intro to the topic that even I could understand.

Justin Campbell – Hacking your Home with Ruby

Justin had one of the “coolest” presentations. He talked about using the Raspberry Pi and being able to directly interact with it via Ruby. There are nearly endless possibilities of what could be done with this. Justin demonstrated using the Raspberry Pi with a USB wi-fi adapter and a relays to be able to control any electrical component wirelessly from your phone or any web browser. This includes lights, garage doors, sprinkler equipment (via solenoid valve), etc. He wrote a library for interacting with the Raspberry Pi called whipped cream. I’ll definitely be checking this out later when I have time.

There were many other great talks, and I’ll be including links to the presentations and videos as they get posted.

There seemed to be a recurring theme for many of the presentations: don’t write code, create software. Don’t focus on the coding, materialize an idea. I know that applies to developers of all shapes and sizes, but I think it rings very true for learning to code also. The best way I have found to learn coding is to build something. It is also much more effective if you are building something you care about. The purpose of coding is to solve a problem, and without a problem it becomes pointless. If you are learning to code, find a problem that is interesting to you and create something that solves it. Maybe you want to make a Fibonacci calculator (which Dan Sharp has posted his code for online in his stock price predictor repo), maybe you want to build a site that matches people with similar hairstyles… it doesn’t matter. Tools like Codecademy and CodeSchool are great to get started, but remove those training wheels as soon as you can and you’ll be riding that bike faster than you thought (after a few scraped knees and maybe a concussion).

SO GET OUT THERE, GET EXCITED, AND BUILD SOMETHING!

Another thing I wanted to mention was one of the main themes of Sandi Metz’s opening keynote speech. You will die. People around you that you love and care for will die. You will grow old and your body will start to fail you. Don’t spend your entire life living behind a computer screen. It’s so easy to get stuck living in your own little bubble and not realize there’s an entire world going on around you. Get out and exercise, spend time with your family, relax once in a while… live your life.

Last, a big thanks to the organizers, the sponsors, the volunteers, and all the attendees that made this weekend so special. I can’t wait to see you next year!

Thanks for reading,

Brent