James Golick wrote a very good article about testing a while ago. In it he dissects (and refutes) the too often heard arguments where people say they don’t write automated tests because they don’t have the time.

In the comments, some people concluded that yes, they should try to write more tests, but didn’t know where to start. In this post I won’t suggest frameworks, or specific tutorials. I’d just like to give one very first step that will help you write code that is easier to test. You’ll benefit from it even if you don’t use a testing framework yet.

I had a bit of a culture shock a couple of days ago. I saw a video of the visual designer for IronRuby, named SapphireSteel. The tool looks very nice and polished.

Something unsettled me, however, when I saw it. It has nothing to do with the team or what the narrator says. In the demo, he shows us a couple of features of the designer, and inevitably we end up seeing snippets of code. That’s when the culture shock, uhh, shocked me.

I’m very pleased! My presentation went very well, the audience was very receptive. We had some great questions and interactions during the talk. Great fun! Here we can see my neck-twisting setup and me, gesticulating vehemently.

Good news everyone *!

Tomorrow my presentation at Montreal on Rails is going to be made on my brand new Mac Mini!

In my last post I mentioned I was going to present on an ooooold Win XP laptop, but I decided to make the switch to the Mac world now. Well, one week ago. So fear not, I’m not going to subject our community to a 5 square meters XP/Powerpoint eye bleeding festival.

For a good while now, I’ve been using Ubuntu on my main home machine. Working with Ruby and JRuby on Linux is a charm.

Tonight, as I tried to set myself up to work with JRuby on Windows*, I bumped into an annoying problem. When I tried to configure jirb, the JRuby version of IRB, it didn’t always seem to find the .irbrc config file in my home directory. I looked a bit on the ‘net and found nothing that helped me solve my problem. I’ve worked out a fix, you can follow along in this wonderful adventure.

Recently, at work I’ve had to implement a couple of simple scripts. They were yet again not simple enough to be captured completely in a batch file. For example I needed to have an arbitrary precision and format date/time that I could use in a file name. date /t and time /t weren’t cutting it.

I started this blog sometime in August. However, in order to get used to posting online, I already had a tumblr where I could post stupid stuff that occurs to me, come across, hear about or find at the grocery store, even. I think the absent pressure about content quality helped me get the ball rolling.

Tonight I was inspired and even went to the extent of expressing myself in video :-)

As seen on the Rails blog, sitepoint.com is giving away free PDF copies of Patrick Lenz’s book, Build Your Own RoR Web Apps. The offer is good for 60 days. Well, 59d15h at the time of posting :-)

It involves jumping through a couple of hoops, and the book contains a couple of pages containing ads about other Sitepoint books. But nothing too bad, at first sight. And it’s still a free PDF book! So if you know anybody who’s curious about Rails and might want to try it out, you have until the beginning of December to point him/her to rails.sitepoint.com.

Tonight is Montreal on Rails #3! I can’t wait to attend: this will be a nice refreshment from my gruesome C++ tar pit at work, ugh! :-)

The first 2 were very interesting and filled with great people to meet. Tonight promises to be just as great, and as a bonus, we’re leaving behind the small McGill University classroom to be welcome instead by Fred and Ben from Standoutjobs. Can’t wait to see that either!

And great big thanks to Mat and Carl for organizing this monthly meetup!

Here’s the deal. I have to beat writer’s block. I wrote a first post a while ago, then came the time for a little vacation and haven’t gotten down to write here again. Well, except for this quickie.

I thought I’d write a list of the podcasts I listen to. This way I can just point people here when they’re curious. I’ll put this somewhere else soon, to update it when I discover new stuff, but now I’m just in brain-dump mode :-)

Those I listen to religiously