I attended Desert Code Camp 2011 (DCC11) today. It was an incredible array of sessions, overwhelming to say the least. I attended 6 sessions. Below are the links and my notes for each.
- Test-Driving ASP.NET MVC Applications – the presenter was Remi who did an incredible job talking about test driving web applications. While I am a PHP developer, web application testing is the same across the board. He was very insightful. I was able to catch up with Remi later in the day and had a great conversation about porting some of his Ruby/.Net stuff to PHP. I’m excited to collaborate with Remi in the future. Google terms include:
- Mara / CapyBara
- Selenium WebDriver
- BDD (Behavior Driven Development)
- NuGet
- XPath
- Cucumber
- Ruby on Rails 101 – Clayton gave a great intro to Ruby on Rails. I’ve tried playing with RoR several times, only to be frustrated by Ruby. This presentation was very inspiring. I am excited to extend RoR’s logging ability to our up and coming Lumberjack SaaS.
- Ruby Version Manager
- Rails.logger.info
- Passenger, Heroku, NewRelic
- Phoenix Rails Users Group
- PeepCode, RailsCast – good references
- Intro to iOS – This was the weakest of all the presentations I attended. I should have attended iOS 101. I still learned alot.
- UICatalog
- ScrollViewSuite
- PageControl
- Core Data , tableView
- XML performance
- SQLLite or XML for local storage
- save images as pngs
- dealing with change of state is important (suspend, quit, start, etc)
- iOS 202 – I learned alot from Javier. He was a very good teacher/presenter.
- XIB
- IBOutlet IBAction
- protocols and delegates
- atomic/nonatomic – explains how to deal with threads
- alloc/release – load data from plist like config data
- dictionaries – arrays of arrays
- XIB ~ NIB
- iphone.javiergs.com
- Sparking CodeIgniter – This was a great intro to Sparks, CodeIgniter’s new repo system. I look forward to publishing some sparks to it and helping Beau grow the community.
- Mono – I learned alot about Mono/.Net development. Since .Net is outside my core disciplines (PHP), I still learned alot. Remi did a great job talking about it. He has several CLI build tools. The most notable thing about the whole presentation was Remi’s willingness to write tools that didn’t exist. It was very inspiring.
At this point I was pretty tired and left without attending the final session. All in all, the conference was very good. The only downside was there were too many presentations I wanted to attend. Also, there was no central repository for slides, at least a central repo for links to pages would be nice. Also, Wordcamp was able to film all sessions. This would have been great. At screencasts with microphones would have been useful for later reference.
Either way, I can’t wait for the next DCC!