Austin .NET Code Camp re-cap
The Austin .NET User Group put on another fantastic Code Camp this past weekend.
I was especially proud to see 3 members of our staff presenting. You guys rocked.
Kevin Miller launched a potential new career as a public speaker/presenter with a well-received talk on Monorail. The attendees were very excited about what they saw. And kudos to Kevin for coding on the fly, which flowed well and showed his confidence in his knowledge and abilities. Coding on the fly takes some stones.
Bret Pettichord did a talk on Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby. The participants had lab machines and were able to actually script tests. It was the only hands-on talk that I saw, and I heard lots of good feedback from the attendees.
Scott Bellware filled the big room for his talk on Good Test, Better Code – From Unit Testing to Behavior-Driven Design. He demonstrated taking unit tests, and turning them into specifications of the system, which directly lead into documentation. A test that started off with a common name of TestTotal quickly became An_Orders_total_should_be_the_sum_of_the_totals_of_the_line_items. These specifications of the system can then be easily fed back to customers, business analysts, and in our team here at Dovetail, back to our tech writer Melissa. Very cool. Of course, his presentation covered some of his favorite topics, including TDD, Dependency Injection, Ubiquitous language, and was chock full of praises for Microsoft development.
In addition to the Dovetail guys, Jeffrey Palermo kicked out over two hours of Fundamentals of Modern Programming. Tons of great information. Plus, Jeffrey had the best slides of the day – most of them contained just a single word. Very Presentation Zen.
It totally rocks to be part of a local community dedicated to continuous learning and improvement.
