Tampa Code Camp Followup

First, my apologies for the length of time since my last post. I’ve been travelling and haven’t had good access to the internet. I’m at Agile 2006 now and will be posting updates shortly. However, on July 15th, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Tampa Code Camp at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. All in all I got to present 4 sessions, and had a great time.

Perhaps most interesting from this code camp was the reaction to my Test-Driven Development and Ruby/Rails demos. In the TDD sessions, people were highly skeptical of the process we were following – especially writing failing tests with code that wouldn’t even compile! (“What about intellisense?!” was a common cry). However, as we worked through our example, it became clear what TDD was really about, and even some of the people who were shaking their heads the hardest seem to figure out what it was really about.

Another observation is how much vocabulary really plays into explaining concepts to observers. Writing a failing test which we’ll make green seems like quite an esoteric comment. But saying that we are going to write a test which shows that when we write the code we want to, we’ll know it works by them, seemed to come across much better. Don’t get hung up on vocabulary – it’ll bite you quite often if you do.

So, without further ado, here’s the presentations from my Ruby, Fitnesse and TDD talks. The fourth talk was to fill time when a presenter didn’t show up, and so there’s no formal presentation for it, since it was a combination of a code demo and chalk talk.

• Fitnesse
• Ruby
• TDD – Powerpoint and code

Thanks so much to the organizers, and especially to those who took a Saturday off to come out and talk about code. I couldn’t have asked for better audiences, or a better time.