TSS DSL Keynote Recap

Martin Fowler and I just finished delivering the keynote on Language-Oriented Programming at The ServerSide Symposium in Barcelona, Spain. He and I have never presented together before, but we are both passionate about this subject, so it sounded like fun. And it was. I created a skeleton slide show in Keynote, to which he added and made suggestions, and we paired for about 1/2 hour the night before to make sure that it represented not only a consensus view but also good leaping off points for the presentation. We approached it like a public conversation: we had pretty minimal slides, and we took turns talking about the subject (along with minor disagreements) along the way.

There was a little bit of a frenzy just before it started. For some reason, some projector switching boxes just don't seem to like the Mac. My laptop worked fine in all the other breakout rooms (that only had one projector). In the main room, my machine could see that it was attached to an external monitor (I could see the resolution, the refresh rate, and every other detail about the external projectors), but for some reason they refused to show the image. I worked on this with an increasingly frantic IT guy from the hotel. We tried a Dell laptop and it worked fine. He kept insisting that there was something wrong with my machine, and I kept demonstrating to him that I could see his equipment just fine. I've encountered this problem before (see this entry, and it always turns out to be the switching box for the projectors, which for some bizarre reason has an affinity for Windows). Finally, as a last resort (time was running out), I exported the presentation from Keynote to a PDF file, copied it to a thumb drive, and moved it to the Windows laptop. I lost all the animations and other effects, but the slides looked OK. By this time, it was time to start speaking, so I opened the slide show full screen on the laptop. Unbeknownst to me, someone had set the machine to operate in kiosk mode when Acrobat is full screen, so the slide show starting playing without me doing anything. Finally, rather than try to figure out how to turn that off in front of 300 people, I just left it with the Acrobat Reader border showing and launched into the talk. As much as I love the Mac, it seems that the rest of the world still harbors ill-will for anything non-Windows. And it's not major stuff anymore -- it's the strange little things like switching boxes for projectors.

For anyone who saw the presentation, that was why it was in non-full screen Acrobat Reader view. Despite this hiccough, I thought the talk went reasonably well. Martin and I both have lots to say on this topic. When we started, I feared that we wouldn't have enough material, but he and I are both prodigious talkers, so we ended up having to rush a little to get to the end. I feel like we presented a pretty good summary view of how we both feel about this important subject.

Speaking at TSS Barcelona Next Week

I spoke at the The ServerSide Symposium in Las Vegas earlier this year. Next week, I'm traveling to Barcelona (for the first time) to speak at the European edition. Martin Fowler and I are pairing on the keynote, about Domain Specific Languages (a topic for which he and I share considerable enthusiasm). I'm also doing a regular talk on Selenium.

Coalmine Canary Tests

I was pairing the other day and we started talking about the scope of tests. I'm a huge advocate of writing the simplest, just slightly more than trivial tests when doing test-driven development, especially in a dynamic language (we were using Ruby). My pair, Kristy, and I got into a discussion of around 2 areas: just how simple should they be and should you keep them around after you've written the code? Lots of developers use these ultra simple tests, then make the test more robust once they've gotten the first incarnation to pass. I'm a fan of what I call "Coalmine Canary" tests. Back in the old days, coal miners used to take caged canaries down in the mines with them. The birds were much more sensitive to the gas that can build up in mines; if the bird died or starting struggling for breath, the coal miners knew it was time to high-tail it out of the mine. In the same way, very simple tests help you judge the safety and semantics of the code under test. We created a very simple test (basically, verify a method that included a semi-complicated ActiveRecord query returned a non-zero number of rows). We decided to keep it around, because it verified that we were calling the infrastructure correctly (in other words, that the semantics of the method were correct). Sure enough, as we started adding more code to the class, we introduced bugs. The first test we ran after making changes was the Canary test. If it failed, we knew that we had a fundamental problem with our infrastructure and didn't even bother looking at the more complex, nuanced behavior we have added until the Canary test passed again.

Having (and keeping) the simple Coalmine Canary test is a great sanity check on your code. If it fails, you've got serious problems, and you'd better fix those before you do any more mining in your code.

Neal and David Talkin' 'Bout Agile

As a sneak peak to the workshop David and I are doing at The Agile Experience, No Fluff, Just Stuff caught us late last year in a video podcast about agility, how companies react to it, and it's future. It's a pretty accurate representation of how I feel about agility (minus the faux pas of saying that the Agile Manifesto was signed in Colorado, not Utah).