Like most aspects of programming, testing requires thoughtfulness. TDD is a very useful, but certainly not sufficient, tool to help you get good tests.

I have always said something similar: "High test coverage isn't necessarily good, but low test coverage is always bad."

If you use..

delegate :active_required_roles, to: :app_group, allow_nil: true"

make sure you test and handle the case where it comes back nil!!

Resources to help kids to program

• Learn to Program by Chris Pine
• Kids ruby
• Puma web server
• Chris Le github

Trotter on Cloud Foundry... Heroku but you run it yourself

Erlang/OTP is a good example of this.

Components

• Cloud Controller
• Droplet Execution Agent
• Message Queue
• Router (bound to port 80)
• Health Manager

Download a Micro Cloud. Buy VMWare Fusion. $50

Jim Weirich

Gave a great talk, but Nocs lost all my notes. :[

Code Charcuterie

Aaron Patterson, Rails Core Developer

Avoiding surprise null pointers

• ruby auto-vivifies variables and this leads to problems
• use -w when running ruby. Rails team considers warnings bugs, but others do not.
• don't use bare instance variables!
• helper_method :name is one way
• instead use internal Context methods? [This seems way too convoluted though]
• Rails core team is looking for a way to automate the context object creation

Rails 4

• Queuing

How to Build a Web-powered Karaoke Machine

Rob Spectre @dN0t

Cool demonstration of the twilio platform. It is python-based, Heroku-centric platform that lets you turn your browser into a phone.

Emerging Programming Languages

Alex Payne, Founder, SimpleBank

Different languages for different jobs!

Job: Better Java

• Kotlin: Java + closures
• Gosu: Java + native SOAP + some ruby?
• Ceylon: Java w interceptors, from RedHat

Job: Better JavaScript

• StratifiedJS: adds structured concurrency
• CoffeeScript: JavaScript, the good parts. Ruby inspired syntax, white space sensitive
• Objective-J:
• ClojureScript: Clojure -> JavaScript
• Dart: from Google, generics, optional typing
• Roy: functional into JS, monads, functional, pattern matching

Job: Web Development

• Opa: OCaml variant
• UR/Web: Haskell

Job: Systems programming

• Go: bring C up-to-date
• Rust: from Mozilla. Improve C++.
• OOC: Objective-C alternative

Job: Dynamic Programming

• Fancy: runs on Rubinius. Actors
• Slate: a modern Smalltalk
• Elixir: alternative language for the Erlang VM
• Frink: make calculations simple
• Julia: alternative to R. Dynamic, compiled, parallel.
• Faust: digital signal processing

Job: Processing Data

• Bandicoot: a language for set algebra
• Quirrel: part of pre-cog. Lang for Analytics. Declarative, functional

Job: Make you Think

• Wheeler: different. No variables, no functions, no objects
• Kodu: XBox visual programming

How Github Works

Scott Chacon, CIO, Github

• 4 founders in a (somewhere)
• How do you grow a company without losing what makes it itself
• [http://zachholman.com]

General

• hours are bs
• the best solutions happen when you're in the zone
• embrace flexibility
• working long hours is a badge of foolishness
• trust your employees
• be asynchronous
• office is their chat room
• keep developers in the zone (headphone policy: no talk)
• no "official" managers
• shipping culture
• minimum viable process
• make it ok to say no

Specifics

• Master is always deployable. Deploy 7-10 times a day.
• Everything in a branch... Pull request on branch... One approved... Merge into master... Deploy
• Partial deploys -> staff- only
• Fast tests... A slow test is a regression. CI server for all branches.
• Graph everything, graphite, collect metrics for everything you care about.
• No one has left in 4 years
• happiness-oriented workplace

Culture Eats Agile for Breakfast

Stacia Viscardi, AgileEvolution

Corporate Culture is essentially immutable. Are people really uncomfortable with change? [i am not so sure]

People have a need to belong. Agile is a combination of Practices AND Values So what makes Agile go astray? Culture!

[its ok to have nothing to do]

You lose 20% efficiency for each additional project you work on. Dedicated Teams are much more efficient.

• create env where it's safe to fail
• make employees see themselves as innovators
• make sure to reward teamwork

The Programming Ape

Coda Hale, Yammer

Software is for people

But what are people? We are very unreliable... We are not Introspectable.

Just as vision can be tricked by optical illusions, so can the mind

• Intuition - involuntary, fast, effortless, invisible, costless, powers creativity
• Attention - voluntary, slow, difficult, requires effort and energy. Humans have adapted to conserve this.

Your mind "primes" certain concepts so you can respond more quickly. The brain will swap out a difficult problem that it can't solve for an easy one that it can.

• Too long; didn't read
• Too subtle; didn't notice
• Too busy; didn't see it
• Too tired; didn't care

This can lead to ego depletion which causes bad decisions

• leverage intuition
• let the visual cortex do the work
• build ambient awareness
• group by context, not how they were produced
• conserve attention
• make daily life sustainable