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Kyle Baley - The Coding Hillbilly

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works" -- Douglas Adams

South Florida CodeCamp Wrap-up

The company that invents a PDA that mimics the mind of Dave Noderer will have a license to print money based on what I witnessed this past Saturday. The man clearly thinks in terms of some DSL based on tasks and bulleted lists in order to pull together the South Florida Code Camp. Over 600 attendees, twelve tracks, at least three dozen speakers. All executed with the efficiency of a good UI, in that you don't even notice it until you stop to think about it.

Since I presented for half the allotted time, I didn't get a chance to see too many other presentations. Saw Mark Miller present on the science of good UI, a topic that probably deserves a separate post but I make no promises just yet. In any case, it was entertaining and thought-provoking. Also watched Larry Port talk on CruiseControl and NAnt and got some good tips from him.

For my part, I'm reasonably happy with how my sessions went though some need more work than others. Had a technical glitch during two of them in the form of a laptop crash that I won't speculate on just yet until I've had a chance to investigate further. Suffice it to say, my plan to screencast my presentations will not come to pass.

Other than that, if anyone attended any of the sessions, all feedback is welcome. But keep in mind that my psyche is very fragile and that any negative comments will be met with either, "I know you are but what am I?" or "Sticks and stones will break *your* bones..."

Also inspiring was the reaction I got from the user group community when I spoke of my plan to start a user group in the Bahamas. Hard to say whether it was the humanitarian spirit or the pleas of "For the love of all that is Hillbilly, schedule your code camp in winter!" from attendees visiting from northern parts of the country. I came away encouraged nonetheless.

Kyle the Camper

Published Feb 04 2008, 10:17 AM by Kyle Baley

Filed under: Presenting

Comments

David Silverlight said:

Hey Kyle,

Yes, it was definitely a great Code Camp!!! I would have liked to sat in on your Brownfield session, but it was at the same time as one of mine. This morning, I just made the evals live on CodeCampEvals.com. Attendees will be able to post their feedback on your sessions and you will have a cool interface to check out the results in real time. An email should go out today to all of the attendees by our PDA minded friend, Dave Noderer.

# February 4, 2008 11:00 AM

Mike Suarez said:

Hi Kyle,

I was at your TDD session and you kept it pretty cool under the blue screen pressure. It made the start a bit slow but the Catalog tests went pretty smooth. It was the only session that I could follow writing code.

In particular, I would approach the test for adding a song differently. Instead of checking the counter I used a has function.

private Catalog subject;

[TestInitialize]

public void init() {

subject = new Catalog();

}

[TestMethod]

public void Catalog_can_store_a_song() {

string title = "stairway to heaven";

Song stairwayToHeaven = new Song(title);

Assert.IsFalse(subject.has(stairwayToHeaven));

subject.add(stairwayToHeaven);

Assert.IsTrue(subject.has(stairwayToHeaven));

}

I started with song as a string so the next test Catalog_indexes_songs_by_artist made me refactor to a Song object. I think that’s a trick that could be thrown in.

[TestMethod]

public void Catalog_indexes_songs_by_artist() {

string title = "stairway to heaven";

string ledZeppelin = "led zeppelin";

Song stairwayToHeaven = new Song(title, ledZeppelin);

subject.add(stairwayToHeaven);

IList<Song> zeppelinSongs = subject.findByArtist(ledZeppelin);

Assert.IsTrue(zeppelinSongs.Contains(stairwayToHeaven));

}

At the end we were running out of time and the Mock intro did not go as smooth as the other tests. But like I said, it was the session I enjoyed the most because it allowed to be followed coding.

Thank you for everything.

Also, please consider South Florida as an US alternative to Bahamas for a great IT location.

# February 4, 2008 12:09 PM

Kyle Baley said:

@David: Yeah, that happened to me in a couple of my sessions too. Glad to see the evals going up.

@Mike: That's an interesting approach. Almost "fluent-y". But I wonder about having a method that seems to exist solely to allow us to assert that the song has been added. That could be because of the name of the test though. Perhaps it should be Should_be_able_to_verify_a_song_exists_in_the_catalog.

That assumes that that functionality is desired, of course. If we don't need to do that, this test shouldn't exist.

In any case, you'll find that coming up with good tests is more art than science and in that regard, I'm more Salieri than Mozart.

And don't you worry. I'll be back in the South Florida dev community often, whether you like it or not. It's an amazingly strong one and at the very least, I want to take notes for my efforts on the island.

# February 5, 2008 6:55 AM

Mark Caplin said:

Kyle,

Thanks for your TDD session. I learned a lot about how to properly start my TDD tasks. I also appreciated the understated humor (in a Steven Wright kinda way) in your presentation. Every presenter should be required to include some humor in their presentation. After all, it's a long day of technical information for a Saturday.

# February 6, 2008 9:29 AM

Tom Opgenorth said:

Does Don know you're seeing other people's presentations on Nant & CruiseControl? He might get jealous you know.

# February 6, 2008 3:06 PM

Joe Healy said:

Thanks for being there Kyle. Great having a top notch "international" speaker like yourself attend. Sorry I was out of it that day. Damn sinus infection drug me down. Healy

# February 11, 2008 3:11 PM

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