Presenting at CodeMash 2013

In my continuing bid to rejoin the development world, I’m going to be co-presenting two workshops at CodeMash 2013 with Corey Kaylor and Josh Arnold.

Making Test Automation with Web Applications Work

Let’s assume you’ve accepted the arguments in favor of automating at least part of the testing against your web application and you’ve generally nailed down all the soft fuzzy process and collaboration issues, now you’re simply left with the very hard problem of doing effective automated testing — and that’s what this workshop will concentrate on.  We’re going to be light on software process issues but very heavy on concrete technical problems and solutions.  We’ll talk about how we try to make our automated tests more reliable, faster, able to accept changes in the user interface, and less work to author.   We will be showing examples using our own .Net and FubuMVC flavored stack of Storyteller2, Serenity, WebDriver, and Jasmine, but I think that the concepts and strategies should directly transfer to other platforms and tools.

Fully Operational FubuMVC 1.0

I’m very consciously using CodeMash as a forcing function to make FubuMVC arrive at a 1.0 release — documentation, new nugets, tutorials, diagnostics and stable API’s.  I think we’re going to be able to make a pretty compelling case for why FubuMVC is worth exploring even in a world crowded with Ruby on Rails, Play, Lift, Node.js, and Sinatra.

If we manage to pull off a healthy fraction of the demos that we have planned, I’m going to do the “Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!” thing, but hopefully without getting thrown down an inexplicably placed well by Darth Vader afterward.  Seriously, why was there a giant, uncovered hole right in the emporer’s throne room?

Neither of these workshops will be filmed, but sometime within the next couple of months we will release Camtasia recordings of the same demo’s as part of our 1.0 release.

Once I’m done with the two workshops I’m going to rest my voice, take in as many talks as I can, catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in quite a while, and just generally mingle.  In particular I’m looking forward to the sessions on Continuous Deployment, client side web development, Clojure, and I want to see the Play framework in action.

See you all there in January.