Code Quality at GORUCO

GORUCO 2012, NYC’s premier Ruby conference, is around the corner and it’s going to be great. (I may be biased, as I help organize the conference, but it’s still true!) We have some fantastic speakers this year, and I’m especially looking forward to three talks that focus on different aspects of code quality:

• “Maintaining Balance while Reducing Duplication – Part 2” by David Chelimsky. This is a follow up to David’s excellent talk from RubyConf 2010 that explored the DRY Principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in depth and illustrated how it can be misapplied. The inherent tensions between different OO design principles is particularly interesting to me. 
• “Sensible Testing” by Justin Leitgeb. Justin really impressed me with his lightning talk at a recent NYC.rb about Ruby mixins and their problems. With this talk, I think he’ll do a great job exploring testing strategies for Rails apps in a practical, nuanced way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Testing Pyramid comes up, which more developers should take to heart. TATFT is great mnemonic, but applying it well over a large codebase and a long period of time requires a great deal of consideration.
• “Hexagonal Rails” by Matt Wynne. Alistair Cockburn has been talking about Hexagonal Architecture (which he now calls “Ports and Adapters”) for years as a way to structure applications for better maintainability. It’s always been enticing to me, but it’s never been clear how to apply it to a Rails application. Matt has started exploring just that on his blog and I’m thrilled he’ll be giving a full-length talk on it at GORUCO. Personally, I hope he covers the implications on the model layer at least as much as controllers/views, and perhaps how this architecture might relate to the Anemic Domain Model antipattern described by Martin Fowler. (If not, I’ll ask him during Q&A. Hah.)

And before you ask, yes, the good folks at Confreaks will be recording the talks and we hope to have them posted within a few weeks of the conference (if not sooner).

If you’re attending GORUCO this year, definitely stop me and say “Hello!” (Either during the day, or aboard the ::ahem:: yacht during the evening.)

Full disclosure: I had the honor of being a member of the GORUCO Program Committee this year that selected the speakers, so it may not be a complete coincidence that my interests are well represented. 🙂