Ruby Magician Nic Williams

Dr Nic Williams is known for his exciting blend of software development, entertaining education, and thorough training.

He picked up Ruby on Rails in 2005, he has released successful websites, such as MyConfPlan, and a growing collection of open source projects that are used throughout the Ruby on Rails community - New Gem Generator, Composite Primary Keys, and his quirkily famous "Magic Models", plus more.

For the last two years, Dr Nic has lived and worked in India, Sweden, Netherlands and Australia; and has worked for telcos and for several startup web companies.

Check out his blog at drnicwilliams.com

Presentation: "Integration testing with Cucumber: How to test anything"

Time: Monday 16:15 - 17:00

Location: To be announced

Abstract: You can write a small Ruby library or simple Rails plugin in only a few lines. But then it grows, it expands and then it starts to break and become a maintenance nightmare. Since its open source you just stop working on it. Users complain that the project has been abandoned. Your project ends up causing more grief for everyone than if you'd never written it at all.

Instead, we will learn to write all Ruby libraries, RubyGems and Rails plugins with tests.

This session is NOT about "how to do TDD". More importantly this session will teach you:

* the one command you should run before starting any new Ruby project or Rails plugin

* the best way to write tests for command-line apps, Rake tasks and other difficult to test code

* how to test that your Rails plugin works against multiple versions of Rails

* how to do Continuous Integration of your Ruby/Rails libraries with runcoderun.com

Once you know how to write tests for all Ruby code, you'll want to do it for even the smallest little libraries and have the confidence to know your code always works.