Me @ NDC2010
My new blog is at at http://cre8ivethought.com/blog/index come and follow me there.
-Mark Nijhof
Many have already blogged about it, and Scott probably described it in the best, but NDC was truly amazing this year. And I was very happy that I was able to speak at such a great conference. This was the first time that I was able to do so in such a big setting and it was extremely cool as well as a bit scary. I had two talks scheduled, one about FubuMVC and another one about Test-Driven JavaScript Development was added later.
I learned a lot!
I have had a nice number of presentations before, most of them for our local NNUG and 2 for the European Virtual Alt.Net (E-VAN), but in such a professional setting I did get a bit nervous. Thanks fully because of the stoplight I couldn’t actually see the people laughing at me, to be honest for all I know there was nobody sitting there.
Then of course the presentation that I was worried most about, the Test-Driven JavaScript one, because of the life coding went the best. My FubuMVC talk on the other hand failed miserably because I couldn’t access my code examples in my VM which cut my talk in half. I also learned that my Mac actually doesn’t pick the largest resolution on its own, something it seems to do on other occasions; so silly me thought that the max resolution at NDC was 800 by 600. I could sure have used the extra pixels in my Test-Driven JavaScript talk. Also I should repeat questions as they are unbearable for the rest of the audience as well as on the recording.
Test-Driven JavaScript
In this talk my goal was to demonstrate as real as possible what it would be like to Test Drive your JavaScript Development, and to help you see that there really isn’t any reason why not to develop in this manner. And because of that I did not rehearse the actual coding exercise till perfection. I mean I know it was possible to do what I wanted, but I wanted to show the whole thinking about what to do as well, not just paste in pieces of code. Because that would not have been anywhere close to actual development. So needless to say I ran in a few small issues, but thankfully nothing that I couldn’t solve and if anything this was as real as it gets. So I am happy with this one. You can see the Test-Driven JavaScript recording here and also all the other recordings from NDC2010 here (well they will be there shortly, amazing how many they already made available).
How do I get started?
So after you have seen the recording and gotten all excited about Test Driving your JavaScript Development but you don’t really know where to go from here. Here is a small list of recourses and stuff that have helped me.
- All the original code for my website (which my demo was based upon) can be found on my GitHub account. This includes the JSpec specs as well as the Cucumber specs. The JSpec specs are in /public/jspec/unit/ where the page (Dom.html) that executes it is located one level higher. The JavaScript file under test is in /public/javascripts/ and the page containing it all is /public/index.htm.
- My actual website, so you can see the results, and also the JSpec specs and the JSLint output.
- JSpec is the JavaScript testing framework of my choice
- The slightly adjusted Dom.html page that includes a timer to facilitate the continuous testing.
- My own addition to better deal with animations, as the JSpec library doesn’t really threat these correctly.
- JSLint is a cool tool to get rid of smaller syntax errors and check the code quality.
- My JSLint execution page, not very special, but hey here it is.
Questions?
If you have any questions, then please let me know, I am more then happy to help where I can.
