Even though I don't do ruby at work, I do it for fun on weekends. I paid for my own self to go to the WindyCityRails conference and tutorial on Cucumber, RSpec Testing. It was well worth the money!! Not many things can get me to go up to Chicago early in the morning and on a weekend!
I went to a 3 hour tutorial class "Behaviour Driven Rails with RSpec and Cucumber" ... in my limited time I can spent with I've had a hard time getting my head around cucumber. I did rspec alot a few years ago, so thats a piece of cake. David Chelimsky and Corey Haines. 4 days before the conference, they sent an email to attendees of the tutorial with a list of resources to read and libraries to install. I worked all week on watching railscasts.com videos on cucumber, factories, testing. I always like to try things out myself first, then I am familiar with it when I go "to class"
Dave and Corey did the class pair programming style..which was totally fascinating. There was one laptop, two wireless mice and one wireless keyboard. Dave typed on the laptop keyboard and Corey typed on the external keyboard. One would talk and explain things while the other typed. They took turns. It was really awesome. After watching them program, then they told us to split up in pairs and do the same thing for another scenario. I was sitting between two people so I kinda bounced between them. The one on my left didn't have the same version of rails, so he typed on my keyboard and we took turns. It was awesome, I had not really done pair programming quite like that before. They bounced between cucumber tests and rspec tests. I wish I could have recorded video and played it back in slow motion!
The regular talks:
Better Ruby through Functional Programming
Dean Wampler, Object Mentor, Inc.
I started to learn haskell once.. bought the O'Reilly book (which is excellent with little exercises)... but thats as far as I got with functional programming. This talk was interesting with code samples of ruby. We were challenged to learn a functional programming language. He mentioned others like scala, erlang ... hmm what to choose!
Super-easy PDF Generation with Prawn and Prawnto
John McCaffrey, Pathfinder Development
I have not had to make PDFs with ruby yet...but now I know there are some great libraries. Cool part of this is John was making a PDF of a ruby app, pulling in twitters happening at the conference and using Googles graphs APIs to make pretty graphs! I saw alot of people saying "I didn't know that Google had graph APIs!!!"
“Comics” Is Hard: On Domains and Databases
Ben Scofield, Viget Labs
When the talk started Ben asked for a show of hands of who reads comics? I meekly raised my hand. My husband is a comic book fan and I read them on occasion. I sat at his table for lunch and he asked me about it. I was surprised he saw my hand, iwas sitting near the back! This talk didn't have much code, but talked about the number of attributes that comic books have (title, issue, theme, publisher, etc) and how hard it was to model in a relational database. He talked about couch db, mongo ... i haven't tried any of those, but I might now that I know it can be the best choice for some data sets.
Rails 3 Update
Yehuda Katz, Engine Yard
Yehuda talked about whats coming up in Rails3. But by this time I was kinda brain dead and was trying to make plans for dinner!
Devchix!!!
A few of the local chix came to the after party and hung out. There was a few at the conference I had not met yet and a few I invited to join! It was awesome. It was so fun. I caught up some of my ruby buddies I hadn't seen in awhile and made some new friends. I was sad to see it end...