Thedwick

It’s been a stop-and-go day today. I had to do a 2 hour conference call in the morning, exactly during an “Agile development with, or despite, a global team” session which was a bummer because I was looking forward to that one.

I did make it to a hands-on, rapid-fire session on test driven development with Ruby on Rails by Kevin Clark. It was a great class, and I was especially happy to see just how much TDD had been baked into Rails from the start, from adding useful assertion methods, to database fixtures, to a pre-canned build file that runs tests by default (rake), etc, etc.

I went to a patterns session that was supposed to be about combining patterns together in groups, but started with so much elementary pattern overview stuff that I lost interest and left. The best thing I got out of that session was a reminder that a pattern is a problem, a context, and a solution *all together*. Trying to just pull one of those out on its own is not nearly as useful as considering that triplet together as a whole.

I also briefly went to a session on open source as a business model. Lost interest in that pretty fast, too, but I did come away with a real appreciation for how painful the proliferation of slightly-different open source licenses is for anyone who has to try to understand them.