Berlin - Day 3 / RailsConf Europe part 1 - Tutorials

The morning started with me finding out that breakfast at my hotel is served from 8 to 11 — while I had to leave before 8. Anyway there’s so many places in Berlin to get a great breakfast. So I had it on the way to the conference.

The 1^st tutorial I atended was Trotter Cashion’s “Refactoring”. that was a good introduction as well as a few great tips for tools to help refactoring:

• heckle: ‘Bebugs’ your code automatically and will tell you what you didn’t cover in you test cases in quite a few cases. It dynamically changes you code by turning ifs to unlesses, ‘==’ to ‘!=’ etc. You get the idea. It then checks whether you unit/tests are failing, i.e. wether they would allow you to find this particular fault. Which they likely won’t in so many cases.
• grep: Well, it’s grep.
• rcov: Another tool to tell you about test coverage. This one generates HMTL reports which show which code is and isn’t executed when running your test cases. Very useful a lot faster than heckle, at the price of being less rigousus.
• glark: A new way for grepping.

After than lunch time revealed that this time lunch is a lot better than at last year’s RailsConf in London. In fact is was excellent. Fresh fish, salads, lettuce, desserts. Options - more than one indeed - for vegetarians.
A minor issue is, just like in London last year, the wireless network: With about 300 attendees around, the network is really really slow.

Now, I’m attending the GIS tutorial (while typing this post). Anyway the accompanying script seems to be a good starting point.

And my RejectConf talk still isn’t done…

RailsConf Europe 2007 in Berlin

A short message: The Registration for RailsConf Europe 2007 is now open.

I just received my order confirmation — looking forward to all the tutorials, talks and the “Bratwurst on Rails”.

Learning Ruby on Windows

Well, I did it myself: Learning Ruby on a Windows machine. However not with such a huge number of books, on-line tutorials and what-not. In fact I learned most of it with The Pickaxe Book (1^st edition, though).

However I just now ran into something new: Hackety Hack. Created by the creator of Why’s poignant Guide To Ruby — whytheluckystiff.

I even installed it on my Mac, well the thing is running in Parallels. Because Hackety Hack comes as a Windows installer. Which is why I called this ‘Learning Ruby on Windows’.

Rails Cookbook for Rails 1.2

I really value good documentation for current versions of software, so I am pleased to see that Rob Orsini’s Rails Cookbook is published quite in time with the release of Rails 1.2 which has been released in the past few days.

This completes the documentation of both Ruby itself and Ruby on Rails even further.