Nick’s Highlights from Ruby Hoedown

I attended and spoke at Ruby Hoedown 2010. Below are my notes from the conference.

Day One (Nuby Hoedown)

David A. Black – The Well-Grounded Nuby

• Seven key points, with code examples
• Every expression evaluates to an object
• if statements and class definitions return objects
• operations are messages (==, +, etc)
• methods are messages (to_s)
• a[2] is equivalent to a.
• case is really if, elsif, etc, which is really x1.===(x0), x2.===(x0), etc.
• String === String is false! Classes define === as meaning “is the argument an instance of me”
• Objects have lookup paths they use to find the method among their associated modules and classes
• Super means keep searching for the next method up. Not necessarily the super class, could just be
  in a module that was included the most recently.
• instance.extend(module) will include the module into that instance, not the entire class
• every object has a singleton class that represents the instance. So the above in actually including
  the module into the instance’s singleton class.
• there is always a “self”. defaults to main:Object

Kevin W. Gisi – Dynamic Ruby for Nubies

• DSLs help bridge the gap between an idea and code, as a layer of abstraction
• I got lost :-(

Lunch

• Om nom nom

Nick Gauthier – The Six Ws of Testing

• I think it went well. Very low on technical content but many Nubies came to talk to me afterward and said they enjoyed it. I’m sure I bored the technical folks to tears. But hey, it’s the Nuby Hoedown!

Matt Yoho – Gem Authoring and Deployment

• “require” loads code once, it is smart
• “load” loads the code without doing any checks
• You should not “require ‘rubygems’” it should already be on the load path
• Don’t use jeweler, use a real gemspec

  http://yehudakatz.com/2010/04/02/using-gemspecs-as-intended/

  Unsure about this, maybe the gemspec has enough automation you don’t have to do this any more?

• Aruba lets you write cuke specs within cuke specs. Helps with command line applications

Hack Session of DOOM

• Two features and one bug on hydra!

Scott Chacon – Getting Git

• http://gitref.org
• http://progit.org
• schacon@gmail.com (put conf name in subj when emailing questions)
• tree -a for nice tree list of a directory
• check out his slides for example of cool showoff styling and layout

  http://github.com/schacon/showoff-wrangling-git

• Email him to ask what he uses for his diagrams and highlights (backgrounds)
• Would be really cool to allow a [dot] keyword in showoff to interpret the following graphviz code as a diagram
• git log branchA ^branchB
  show commits reachable by A but not by B
  for example, I’m working on branch my-feature
  git log my-feature ^master
  is the stuff I’ve done that’s not in master yet
• git branch –merged
  show me all branches that have been merged (safe to delete)
• git branch –no-merged
  show me all branches that have not been merged

Day Two

Bryan Liles – Coding in Anger (or is that Desperation?)

• Bryan Liles sings country
• “run through the problem, take no prisoners” … “and undoubtedly do some bad things”
• “we build straw houses”
• “if you do it the wrong way just to get it done, you’ll get hit in the future”
• Cargo Cult: “we’re all guilty of it” and “it’s bad”
  • Copy-pasting other people’s code without understanding it
  • “Copying code is not bad”
  • “It might do the right thing, but it might not be doing the right thing”
  • Read the code first
  • Respect the copyright
  • Understand what you copy
  • Don’t “copy and paste”
  • UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU COPY
• “It takes a big man to understand humility”
• Break a task down and constantly refine task estimates
• A desperate coder is a bad coder

bonus lightning talk: You are your own sales person

• you are the product
• you are the salesperson

Justin Love – You already use Closure

• Block based programming
• containment: f = File.read vs File.open do |f| …; end
• You can call a proc with []
  proc.call(a,b) is equivalent to proc[a,b]
• duwanis in IRC: “rack of lambda”

Nick Gauthier – Grease your Suite

Matthew Bass – A/B Testing for Developers

• Choose a metric
• Do some experiments
• Compare the metrics
• Vanity for rails A/B testing

Yossef Mendelssohn – The Perpetual Novice

• Dryfus skill acquisition model
• Novice level: follow the rules, do what you’re told
• Adv. Beginner: limited ability to perceive different aspects of the situation
• Competence: multitasking, handle more information, see how actions are related to goals
• Proficiency: higher level view of the task, prioritize, adapt
• Expert: no longer relying on rules and guidelines, deep & tacit understanding, intuition
• be mindful of your scenario: other people (or yourself) need to deal with the work you’ve done
• unconscious incompetence: you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t know that you don’t know it
• conscious incompetence: you don’t know what you’re doing, but you know that you don’t know what you’re doing
• conscious competence: you can do it and you understand it, but you have to think about it
• unconscious competence: it is second nature to you. You know what you’re doing and you don’t have to try
• Dunning-krueger effect:
  • when you don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t appreciate the skill itself, and are therefore very confident of yourself.
  • If you understand the skills, the more competent people think they are not very competent
• You need to practice, outside your main work
• Focus on getting better, the entire time
• low level people working together can be dangerous
• a skilled person working with a lower level person need to work at the lower person’s level
• Shuhari
  • Shu: learning fundamental techique, rules and guidelines (acceptance)
  • Ha: detach, digress, and break from tradition. think for yourself
  • Ri: transcendence: moved past rules and guidelines (no form)
• Shoshyu: beginner’s mind. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In an expert’s mind, there are few.
  • Experts have a tendency to stop asking questions
  • Beginners always ask questions
• Something doesn’t suck just because it’s old

Starcraft interlude

• Nick Gauthier vs Bryan Liles and Saxon

Ben Scofield – Keynote

• Practice is important for mastery
• Practice is not fun
• mastery is know how to do things, not just knowing what was done
• mastery is not required
• as a company, deciding what not to do is as important (or more) as deciding what to do
• Pick out what is most important to succeed, and outsource the rest
• errbit : open source alternative to hoptoad
• as a company, focus on the most important stuff
• live intentionally: think about what you’re spending your time on.
• Embrace adequacy (and mediocrity)

Day Three

Family friendly ruby conf in disney world. $189/night @ contemporary. Free conference.

http://magic-ruby.com

Michael Jackson – Parsing Expressions in Ruby

• Different school of thought alternative to regular expressions
• Regexes are great but complicated ones get really gross, even after 10 or 12 characters
• parsing expressions are:
  • declarative
  • recursive
  • readable
  • easy to maintain
  • not ambiguous
  • slow :-) (in ruby)
• Citrus gem

John Willis – Configuration Management in the Cloud with Chef

• infrastructure as code
• need to be able to share with teammates
• can’t have “the deploy guy”
• Chef is a library for configuration management
• Chef client runs on the system (to accept commands and configuration)
• Chef server is a RESTful API
• Each system you configure is a Node
• Attributes are searchable
• Knife is the tool you use to interact with the API
• Nodes have Roles, which describe what a Node should be
• Nodes have a Run List
  • What Roles or Recipes to apply in Order
• A Resource is a Package or a Service
• E.G. Package “sudo” “1.6.8p12″ and it figures out what package manager to use
• Services support actions (e.g. apache supports “restart” and “status”)
• Resources take action through providers
• Data bags store arbitrary data
  • E.G. put a user w/ their ssh key in a data bag, so you can add them as a user on the server
• Cookbooks are shareable
• “Open source for infrastructure”
• Open training
• Cloud service independence (swap from slicehost to rackspace just by adding credentials)
• http://www.opscode.com
  • 5 chef servers for free
• @opscode @botchagalupe
• Chef beats puppet on cloud support (more vendors)

Backchannel notes

• Whiskydisk for deploy

Alex Sharp – Refactoring in Practice

• Shantytown application: you want to bulldoze it, but people live there
• testing in crucial for refactoring
• avoid the EPIC refactor
• changing the implementation without changing its behavior
• deprecate action
  • for example, hoptoad a deprecation warning on old calls to actions
  • helpful when there are ajax calls you are not sure about
• take out small chunks and get them under test
• lack of framework knowledge – often using existing solutions is an easy refactor
• Domain driven development & domain modeling
• Document the smells
• delete code that you aren’t using

Brian Hogan – There’s a Wheel for that Already

• “I don’t want to use that because I don’t like how it looks”
• How often is “better” really just an opinion
• Forwardable – delegate a method to another class
• Rails.root.join(‘config’, ‘x.yml’)
• dir, base = path.split
• open-uri wraps net/http, net/https, net/ftp
• Tempfile (like tmpdir, but just for one file)
• x = Tempfile.new(‘hydra.yml’)
• OpenStruct.new(Yaml.load(‘config.yml’))
• Observer
  @@@ ruby
  def initialize
  add_observer MyObserver.new
  end
  … later
  call: “changed” !
• bash alias for serving static files via webrick
  I wasn’t able to write it down quick enough.
• PStore for storing data
• CSV is great if it doesn’t need to be faster
• Home Run for datetime speedup via C extension
• Oh no, I had to catch my flight and I missed the rest of this awesome talk!

Glenn Vanderburg – Keynote

• Wasn’t there. See notes from Lone Star Ruby Conf. It was probably the same talk