The Google Testing Blog has an interview with Jason Huggins, the creator of Selenium, a very cool testing tool for web applications.
A grad student mailed me this morning to ask me what I read to stay on top of things. In no particular order:
Journals
Blogs
I’ve been holding back from advertising DrProject until we had a stable 2.X release (2.0 has some teething issues), but it looks like other people are starting to pay attention. Cool!
Last night’s DemoCamp was a great success: packed house, lots of people talking to one another, some great presentations, and of course, pictures of David Crow’s new daughter. My picks of the night would be Chris Thiessen’s Zoomii, a (very) graphical front-end for shopping on Amazon, and Lillian Angel’s in-the-pub discussion with Leila, but everyone deserved the applause they got. Congrats to David and Jay for a well-run show, and many thanks to the sponsors.
DemoCamp 15 will be hosted by the University of Toronto on October 29. It will run 4-7 instead of 6-9; we hope this will allow people who would otherwise head home to be with their families to attend. Space is once again limited, so please check out the registration page later this week to reserve a spot (it’s free, naturally). We look forward to seeing you all there!
XPToronto (a group for eXtreme Programming and agile development) is starting its fall meetings with a discussion of xUnit test patterns on Tuesday, Sept 18 — see their web site for details, and Adam Goucher’s review of Gerard Meszaros’s new book for an idea of the content.
Ned Gulley (of The Mathworks) has a great article up called “In Praise of Tweaking” that describes a wiki-like programming contest. An entrant’s score is based on both the speed and correctness of his or her code. What makes it really different is that every entry is immediately posted on the project wiki; competitors are encouraged to tweak one another’s entries to get ahead. As this figure shows, the result is incremental improvement punctuated by occasional big leaps as someone makes an algorithmic change. It’s a very cool idea; wish I’d thought of it for CSC301.
4:00 on Saturday September 15th at the Rivoli (334 Queen Street West)
Free!
This month’s topic is: Old Habits Die Hard: Can we change before the Climate does?
Think you’ve heard everything there is to know about climate change?
Here is a bit of a new spin on an old topic:
Can humans change our activities, actions, and habits to combat climate change?
Do we have the science & technology to combat global warming?
What kind of adaptations are necessary in order to survive?
Exchange ideas with scientists from various fields to find out what we don’t know about the human aspect of climate change.
900 students, 1500 mentors, and an 81% success rate — kudos to Leslie Hawthorn and everyone else who made it such a success (again).
Uncategorized
“Earlier this year, the University of Washington partnered with Google to develop and implement a course to teach large-scale distributed computing based on MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).” (details on the Google Code blog)
If you’re wondering why electoral reform matters, take a look at the Green Party’s proposals, and ponder the fact that despite getting several percent of the popular vote, they have little or no chance of winning any seats (and hence of affecting policy, or growing in size). I don’t agree with lowering the voting age, and I don’t think there’d be much of a software industry left if people actually banned unpaid overtime, but other than that, this is the most sensible election platform I’ve seen in years. (And for those who still think the Greens are pie-in-the-sky treehuggers, read #9 carefully: no new nuclear or coal power, but only if consumers can reduce consumption by 20%.)
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