What I Learned Today
I spent the day at Developer Day, held at the Durham Arts Council. My mind got overstretched with science.
Highlights for me from each talk:
- Andy Hunt, "Refactoring Your Wetware" - The idea of "morning pages" at a cognitive jump-start.
- Jason Rudolph, "Evolving Your Git Workflow" - Fully-automated git bisecting.
- David Eisinger, "Optimizing Perceived Performance" - Loading 60% of a progress bar slowly, and rocketing through the rest of it is actually more satisfying to users than running through it at a constant pace.
- Lightning Talks - Toss-up between the crazy speed of Redis and the idea of using mod_include after generating pages with Rails or something else to selectively include stuff in production.
- Chad Humphries and Jess Martin, "Getting Girls with Musical Magic and Ruby" - Apparently, making musical mashups is dead-easy.
- Aaron Bedra, "From Paralysis to Static Analysis: A Ruby 1.9 Case Study on Upgrading RCov" - Writing Ruby C-based extensions is apparently way easier than I imagined. I should write one of these.
- Ben Scofield, "Page Caching Resurrected: A Fairy Tale" - I lucked out and heard most of this talk before-hand, but the idea of page caching and selectively adding in dynamic data via AJAX is just totally boss.
From my own talk, Scala: A Modern Language, I found I present better when I appeal to emotion rather than to reason. I have to think about that some more.
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