Writing Software not Code with Cucumber – slides from Ruby Hoedown

Hah! My last blog post was for slides when I presented last… I need to write more I think.

Anyways, I just finished presenting at the Ruby Hoedown. It was roughly the same talk I gave at Mountain West Ruby conf but with a lot more advanced material and content in general. It went somewhat okay. I think I went too fast leaving some people behind when I was racing through the “basics”. I had wanted to cover some of the more advanced topics that don’t get covered usually, but in the end I feel like the presentation came off as rushed and unfocused. It didn’t help that I was going off of 3 hours of sleep either. :/ Another issue was the color of my code slides, which looked awesome at MWRC but just didn’t project well on this projector- so, planning fail on my part. I apologize for failing to recognizing my audience and the sub-par delivery. Regardless, I’m glad I did it and I’d like to thank Jeremy for inviting me to speak. </presentation_retrospective>

The presentation was a little meta… I was using a sinatra app I wrote called CodeNote that allows audience members to follow along but not go ahead. A presenter is able to define the slides in a variant of Pat Nakajima’s awesome slidedown format. I also integrated it with twitter so that I could ask questions and people could respond to them via twitter to win a book. This explains the spamming of the #cucumber hash tag during my presentation. The meta part was that I showed how to test the twitter integration during the presentation. Writing a test for that involved using a webservice (twitter), AJAX, and running background jobs. I didn’t get into it nearly as much as I had hoped (which may be a good thing in retrospect) so if you are curious I would suggest checking out the code on github.

Here are the slides:

Note: Since SlideShare is lame now and won’t let you download the slides without an account here is a PDF copy of the slides if interested.