Two Code Camps Last Month

I had the opportunity to speak at two code camps in May.  I spoke at the Iowa Code Camp and of course the Austin Code Camp.  I had a great time in Iowa, and no one made fun of my Longhorns shirt the whole time.When I wasn’t presenting I saw some great sessions as well.

Unobtrusive JavaScript & jQuery Session

We had a really good discussion about UJS and where it applies. The whole point of Unobtrusive JavaScript is to make your sites accessible to the widest possible audience.  Using semantic markup, CSS, and UJS allows you to do that.  Of course jQuery is my library of choice for these types of sites.

TDD Dojo Session

I did the Dojo at Iowa and and Austin.  The Iowa sessions was,..err, rough around the edges.  The group was a mix of people that had little to no experience with testing and seasoned TDD practitioners. So I had to start from the very beginning and move slowly.  I used the Los Techies Day of TDD materials which probably moves too slow for the length of time I had available.  The seasoned veterans made up for their boredom of the materials by asking me (much welcomed) questions about my day to day TDD practices.  I hope everyone got something out of the conversation and the dojo style of presenting.

When I did the TDD dojo again in Austin, I learned from my mistakes.  I enlisted the help of Greg Long. We had about the same mix of people new to unit testing and those with TDD experience.  This time we broke the group up into to groups.  Greg took the introductory dojo and I did the experienced dojo. While the introductory group did the same prepared kata from Day of TDD, we did a Randoori Kata, where nothing was prepared and the group had to come up with a solution to the problem.

I think both times the dojo suffered from from not enough time to get deep enough into the materials.  I really want to do more interactive style of presentations like this, especially at User Group meetings.  I’m just not sure how to compress it even further.

Deep Dive into Open Closed Principle

The other session at the Austin Code Camp was an in depth look at OCP,patterns to use, and some real world examples.  OCP is like the Nirvana of the Object Oriented Programming.  It takes considerable effort and thought to make your application open for extension, requiring knowledge of other Object Oriented Design principle in order to reach it.  I expanded the talk to include how applying an event driven architecture truly opens up your application to extension.  We had more discussion about this topic than other parts of the talk.  I definitely talk more about EDA.

Materials

I posted the materials for the Austin Code Camp on the download section of the google code site.  I’m also (slowly) putting all of my presentation material at GitHub as well.  It doesn’t say this, yet, but all materials are Creative Commons Licensed.