Bar Camp Manchester == Geeky fun July 29, 2007
I am happy to report that I made it to my first
Bar Camp (
Bar
Camp Manchester ) today and thoroughly enjoyed myself. If you’re a geek who
cares about what you do you should definitely go to the one near you. There were
talks on a variety of topics and I was fortunate enough to finally meet
David Seah.
Next time I’ll have to participate in the O’Reilly Make sessions. David came up
with a great chindogu at it. It was a folding stick that could be used to
determine the appropriate distance between you and the person you were talking
to based on their relationship. “Your Sweetie” was only one fold distance,
“Family” might be two, but an “Aquantaince” would be a fully unfolded / extended
stick.
Someone had requested a talk on unit testing and I threw one together Friday
night but ended up arriving slightly late only to find that someone else had
signed up to talk about it. He did an OK job but there was a lot he didn’t
cover. I tried to get people together later in the day to fill in the gaps he
left but, alas, I guess one Unit Testing session was enough for people. I did
however, throw together a talk about Distributed Version Control Systems that a
handful of folks showed up for and seemed to go over rather well. I’d offer you
the slides to that but they were very
Takahashi
Method and were essentially focal units for talking points.
My
unit testing slides (requires Firefox), were fairly self contained and I
just now spent some time expanding them so they should prove useful to anyone
trying to get their head around the Whats, Whys, and Hows of writing tests.
PLEASE give me feedback on it. I’d really
like the opportunity to give this talk and when I do I want to be sure
everything makes sense and answers most of your questions.
The one thing I haven’t figured out how best to convey in the slides is the idea
that in order to go from thinking tests are good in the abstract (as most
developers do) to knowing they’re truly
invaluable you have to really write them throughout a project. It isn’t until
you do that that they start to save your ass repeatedly and truly demonstrate
just how much time writing them will save you.
Big thanks to the
Amoskeag
Business Incubator,
Custom Scoop,
Southern NH
University, O’Reilly,
Appropriate
Solutions, Ektron, and
Hatchling for
sponsoring Bar Camp Manchester and making it all possible.
Some advice for future young (recently out of college) people attending these:
Go talk, or at least listen, to the greybeards. It’s easy to find geeks your own
age to talk to. You don’t have many chances to talk to greybeards, especially
ones who actually care about the art of coding. They have more development
knowledge in their pinky than you’ve learned before, during, and since college.
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