Better late than never, here are some thoughts from the erubycon conference in Columbus Ohio.

erubycon Themes

First of all, what a great conference. The talks were great and the hallway interactions were excellent. Glenn Vanderburg’s talk on “Enterprise, Schmenterprise” hit the nail on the head. (paraphrased soundbite: “The Enterprise it not ready for Ruby, it is desperate for it).

Testing, Testing, Testing

But the theme that kept coming back to me over and over again from the conference was testing: unit testing, integration testing, UI testing, all of them. Stu Halloway’s talk on the “Refactoring of the Week” emphasized the importance of tests to enable refactoring. In addition, Stu made a strong pitch for getting 100% code coverage in the projects you are working on. In selecting code to be refactored for his talks, he would just zero in on any code reported not covered by RCov and start looking there for fruitful refactoring possibilities.

So, the moral of the story is that if you have 100% code coverage, then Stu has to work a bit harder to find examples for his refacting talks.

I was inspired by Stu’s talk so I went back and checked all my open source projects to see how well they were covered by tests. I’m happy to say that both flexmock and builder are now at 100% and only needed a little tweeking to get that last percent or two. (Except for the CSS builder … we really need to finish that class or dump it).

The main library file of Rake is now at 100%. It was in the mid 90s when I check and needed some attention to get it the rest of the way. So that is good.

The unfortunate part is that there are some pieces of Rake that are not well covered. First there are a number of deprecated libraries that aren’t at 100%, and since people shouldn’t be using them, I’m more likely to remove them entirely than to write tests for them.

Second, the are some Rakefile tasks that are not adequately covered. I’m not sure how to address this for Rake tasks tend to be very involved in the environment you are working in, making it tedious to mock. I’d love to make the testing of Rake tasks easier, so fee free to make suggestions.

As for RubyGems … I’d rather not talk about the code coverage stats on that one.

So, I’m making RCov a part of my standard Rakefile setup and will start running it more religiously to keep those code coverage numbers up.

Emacs … We’re not dead yet!

I can’t really call it a “theme” of the conference, more like a strong undercurrent. There was certainly a number of programmers attending who use Emacs for their day to day editting, even when programs like TextMate are available. While emacs is a strong editor for a wide number of programming languages, its support for Ruby and Rails is lagging behind some of the more recent editors that are targetting Ruby specifically (e.g. the aforementioned TextMate). A group of us holdouts got together and shared some tips and tricks on bringing Emacs closer to the state of the art in Ruby support. I’ll share some of those tips here in the near future.

Next Time

Going into this conference, I heard the organizers swear they were never doing this again, but the the end everyone was enthusiastic about next year. So, who knows, if you’ve missed this year’s erubycon, you might get a chance to join us next year.