David Bock

Presentations

Deployment with Capistrano

Capistrano is the de-facto tool used to deploy Rails applications, but it is useful for so much more. In this talk we will publish a real website from scratch, with consideration for real world stuff like safeguarding passwords, turning on and off application monitoring, multiple machine deployments, and general system administration tasks.

In addition to a real deploy in-session, we will look at the real deploy scripts for several real-world, large websites involving multiple machine architectures, minimal (sub second) downtimes, and different server configurations.

Maintaining Source Code Quality (The Project Integrity Series)

How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a big ball of code you have to plod through to try to get anything done? Have you ever been the 'new guy' on a project where it seems like the code grew more like weeds and brambles than a well-tended garden? With a few good tools to help analyze the code, we can keep our project from turning into that big ball of mud, and we can salvage a project that is already headed down that path.

In this talk we will look at PMD, FindBugs, Macker, JDepend, and several other tools that can help us analyze source code and find problems we need to fix. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your personal development processes.

Managing Complexity (The Project Integrity Series)

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How many times have you started a new project only to find that several months into it, you have a build process that mysteriously fails, a bunch of 'TODO' and 'FIXME' comments in the source, and problems that come and go because "it works on my machine"? Does your project have a little bit of 'folk wisdom' that isn't well-known, but is necessary to get things done? How easily could you recreate your development environment if you got a new machine today?

In this session we will talk about some tried and true favorites like Ant, Maven, Subversion, and Eclipse, cover tools like diff, patch, difftools, and diffj for teasing apart changesets, and talk about measuring and managing complexity with tools like cobertura, JavaNCSS, XRadar, CodeStriker, and Jupiter. We will cover each tool in enough depth for you to know what it does and how it can help you and your team, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and see how it would fit in your team's development processes.

Building Semantic CSS with Compass and SASS

Compass is a tool that can help you build cleaner, better structured, and less error-prone CSS. Semantic CSS is a technique where your CSS vocabulary describes WHAT things are on your page, rather than WHERE they are. Together, this tool and this concept can radically improve the structure of your html.

With compass, your CSS is written in a CSS superset called SCSS which can include variables, math, and method calls that evaluate to CSS. The end result is pure CSS - so you don't need to worry about anything 'funny' on the browser side. This lets us write cleaner CSS that documents the intent of our design, not just the 'end result'.

Building Maintainable Javascript with Coffeescript

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CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, and runs in every JavaScript implementation.

In this session we will look at Coffescript, write some coffeescript code, and analyze the generated Javascript. We will look at how we can use it in our existing web development stack, seamlessly compiling the coffeescript into Javascript so it works in our development environment. We will also look at seamlessly using existing Javascript libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous, and JQuery.

Metrics for steering your projects to success

There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the "project as a whole" and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?

While we can gather a lot of metrics from automated source inspection tools, those can make us focus on the wrong "problems to solve"... There are a lot of personal, team, and project-level things we can measure and tune that can lead to big wins. Using advice from an obsessive-compulsive numbers collector, the Personal Software Process, Scrum, the Pomodoro Time Management Technique, and Personal Kanban, we will discuss ways of effectively measuring aspects of our team and our productivity, and actions we might take based on what we learn.

CoffeeScript Workshop (Bring a Laptop)

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Compass & SASS Workshop (Bring a Laptop)

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