![code [dot] leadmediapartners.com](images/rubyista.gif)
Mountain West Ruby Conference
Mar
21
We enjoyed mixing it with fellow Rubyists again at the MountainWest RubyConf 2009. This year, Lead Media Partners made a big splash with 3 members of our team presenting.
We’ve gathered summaries, snippets and goodies from their presentations below, or view their presentations in their entirety at Confreaks.
La Dolce Vita Rubyista
Summary: A talk interspersed with film about overcoming resistance, (re)discovering your passions, sustainable high performance, and enjoying your craft (Ruby and otherwise). Featuring clips from the feature that won the award for best foreign language film at the 2009 MountainWest RubyConf film festival.
Utah Ruby User Group members talk about Ruby and life.
Guy Gene goes to work with Ruby and faces resistance.
Guy Gene discovers some culture, and gets a new set of occhiali.
Guy Gene learns about beauty and is prepared for battle.
Movie Trivia
- The actors playing V-Eye, Ernie “E.” Max, and Tex Mate really use editors of a similar name
- As much as he wanted to, Tex didn’t really injest that cream gleaned off E.'s head, because he can't eat dairy
- The reason Bard looks so good as a comic is that he really does stand up (go see Blake Bard at Wise Guys SLC)
- Guy accidentally wore his “new” glasses from Episode II during the standup meeting in Episode I (the prop glasses he was supposed to wear, which Bard steps on later are $15 generics from OfficeMax and he couldn’t see with them!)
- The iPhone navigation to “Yapona” that mistakenly directs them to Japan happened to Alan in real life…but he turned around when he got to L.A. ;-)
- The translation “I want coding in Ruby to feel natural, like clay in a child’s hand” is fictional (though we can imagine Matz saying it). It goes with a scene that wasn’t ready for the premier, in which Guy learns from a child prodigy with clay in hand
- Jim Weirich ad lib’d the Java and Ruby-colored lens bit on the spot. He was a natural actor and enjoyed the role of occhialista.
- Matthew Nielsen plays Mr. Mann, CEO of the company depicted with the 3 rings logo. The real CEO of Lead Media Partners, Chandler Horsley, makes a cameo in the car unloading scene near the end
- Alan shot the Italian scene background in Rome during a business trip in 2003. If you look carefully, it is the same 8 second loop repeated (pesky waiter keeps going the same way)
- Joseph LeBaron, creative director at Lead Media Partners, put together the alpha masked logo and beacon for the ‘bat signal’ effect
- The letters on the M1N45W4N plate of course refer to ‘MINASWAN’, but you may also recognize the 6 numbers on the right
Outside-In Development with Cucumber
Summary: Cucumber is a BDD tool that aids in outside-in development by executing plain-text features/stories as automated acceptance tests. Written in conjunction with the stakeholder, these Cucumber featuresˇ clearly articulate business value and also serve as a practical guide throughout the development process: by explicitly outlining the expected outcomes of various scenarios developers know both where to begin and when they are finished. I will present the basic usage of Cucumber, primarily in the context of web applications, which will include a survey of the common tools used for simulated and automated browser-testing. Common questions and pitfalls that arise will also be discussed.
Tour Bus
Summary: TourBus is a tool we developed here at Lead Media Partners to answer the question: "Can our site handle the traffic?" It's a load-testing tool for the web that lets you build complex "tours" of a website, and then run them concurrently against your webserver. We used it to performance tune our web cluster to handle ten times the traffic overall, and well over a hundred times the traffic in our critical paths.
