photo by vitalyzator

I presented on RSpec 1.1 tonight at the Dallas.rb. I don’t claim to be an expert, I just love my specs (and now stories).

Feel free to take a look at the slides.

My friend, Chris Gay, is a finalist in the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge with his company, MileMeter. I love the concept of only paying for the auto insurance I am going to use. Both my wife and I work out of the home and therefore our cars sit in the garage alot. But I still have to pay the same rates as my neighbors who drive to downtown Dallas everyday. For both cars!

So now I urge you to go and vote for Chris and MileMeter.

photo by chick_e_pooo

Last night, Adam Keys and I did a little ping pong pairing for the Dallas.rb meeting. It was fun. Of course it highlighted how much I have to jump back to the Ruby docs to get much done. But I don’t see that as a problem, since it leaves more room in my head for other things. It also showed my lack of regex-fu.

Here is the code we worked on. We were trying to solve the Ruby Quiz Credit Card problem, and got most of the way through. The fun part about pairing was bouncing ideas off of each other. Others in attendance were also helpful with their suggestions. It was especially interesting as we looked back over the code and discussed even more ways to clean it up.

Would I do it again? You bet. But I think next time, I would like to work on something that I am more comfortable with, like a Rails related app. I love writing specs for that.

photo by anyoungkevin

We are doing lightning talks at this month’s dallas.rb meeting. I decided to give the group some choice of what I would present.

I will do a short one on “Why Firefox Makes Me Look Good” or “Better Web App Development using Firefox and a Buttload of Extensions”

I can also do one “JQuery: I Don’t Know Much, But I Know I Love You ”

And since neither of those are Ruby related, I will throw another one out there: “Tighter Abs: XML Situps Made Easy With Ruby”

I’ll let everyone decide which ones you want to hear more about.

Update

I only did the JQuery presentation and here are the slides (although they were much more interesting in person).

photo by alangbrf

I will give a presentation on RSpec and Behaviour Driven Development at the Dallas.rb tonight (August 8). Stop by and find out more.

I went to the Dallas DemoCamp2 on Monday night to check out some of the latest offerings from North Texas entrepreneurs. And there was quite a showing with 6 presentations and at least 25 people in attendance.

What I love about DemoCamp is the format. You get 15 minutes for the entire presentation. And that is broken down into 10 minutes for for the demonstration and 5 minutes for questions and answers. With this format you aren’t intimidated by amount of time to fill. Almost anyone can talk for 10 minutes about their project that is the “next big thing.”

Check out the photos and be sure to make it out for Dallas DemoCamp3. Who knows, I might even have a project or two to show off.

It finally happened. McKinney Station got a blog! Right now there is not much here, but should be changing very soon. I have all sorts of articles in my head wanting, no, demanding to get out. Thoughts on web applications, Ruby, Rails, Java, xHTML, CSS, JavaScript and more.

Check back soon for my latest thoughts and ideas. Welcome to the Station, this train is about the leave.