London Tester Gathering Workshops 2015: “Fast Feedback Loops & Fun with Ruby”

My workshop at the London Tester Gathering Workshops 2015 is announced now! They’re offering an early bird rate until the 18^th February, by the way. Find the abstract on the conference page or just read ahead. 🙂

Fast Feedback Loops & Fun with Ruby

Ruby is “a Programmer’s best friend”. Let’s use Ruby to get feedback – including getting feedback automatically – when working on projects. Whether it’s about transforming source code into test results (a.k.a. running automated tests) or generating image files from raw data, Ruby can be used to automate these tasks. Furthermore, it can also be used to automate actually running these tasks, e.g. upon saving a file to disk. Does that sound like a good idea? This session is for you.

I regularly bump into tasks that are…

1. tedious, if done manually
2. not done often enough, unless automated
3. still not done often enough, unless running them is automated, too.

In the workshop we’ll combine some Ruby tools to remedy this situation. In particular the workshop will cover:

1. Writing a simple Ruby program that does something useful, e.g. turn a markdown file into HTML
2. Wrapping that in a Rake task
3. Automate running the task

Knowing how to do this is useful, not only for projects using Ruby as their primary language, but can be handy in all projects.

What is expected:

• Some Ruby knowledge; you don’t have to be an expert or anything like that.
• A notebook (or tablet) with an internet connection & Ruby installed.
  Cool if you’re using RVM, rbenv, chruby or similar
• Mac OS X, BSD; Linux & friends are fine, Windows may be a bit problematic.