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 1st 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…