Sydney, Australia is a great place. I taught a basic and an advanced Rails workshop there and only got back to Seattle last week. It was a little rough leaving 25°C and coming back to 25°F, but I’ll survive!

The Ruby community there is awesome. Myles Byrne gave a talk on a presenter app he wrote in Camping. A few months ago I had an idea for an app that could be used to present and could also be viewed locally by people listening. This makes that possible and could even make an interactive presentation possible where one of the slides is just a frame to Try Ruby or a screen of code that people could copy to their own machine.

I also offered an idea for a Ruby/CSS plugin in the vein of Builder and Markaby (originally developed by Scott Barron). Keith Rowell immediately took the idea on and is working on a plugin (the name may change).

PeepCode 4: Test-First Development

The Ruby community is awesome and has fully embraced my idea for a screencast series. I’m glad to be able to spend time on it.

This week, it’s Test-First Development. Already, people have said

I really love the Test First method. I’m doing it now and it is MUCH better. I feel far more confident about my code than I did before.

Thank for you for the peepcode video – it made my day to see a new post on the peepcode blog in my RSS reader, especially on test-first development.

I was also experimenting yesterday with running Debian on Parallels, which allows me to try out some EXTREME!! Capistrano programming without fear of turning my VPS into a brick. I’ve already got a series of tasks that helps me do a full build of Apache2.2 and remotely control apt-get from Capistrano. Look for a gem and screencast in a few weeks…