This month I had the pleasure of traveling up to Stockholm to speak at a couple of events there. First let me just say that Stockholm is an amazing city full of style, character and charm. From classic coffee houses to modern restaurants there is something for anyone. I highly recommend visiting if you have a chance – you won’t regret it.

While I was there I gave a talk called “Why Ruby, Why Now?” at the first dyncon as well as a talk titled Harnessing Cucumber at Valtech Labs. The first talk was an introduction to Ruby. I have been itching to give an introductory talk for a while and I’m glad this gave me the chance. The audience was a bit more knowledgeable about Ruby than I expected, so some of the items weren’t new to them, however I believe there was still enough in the talk to keep people interested. I also blazed through it since it was right before lunch so maybe people were enthralled merely by my lightning-fast presentation skills. The presentation is available online on Github: https://github.com/aeden/presentation_why_ruby and was created using Scott Chacon’s Show Off.

The second talk I gave was an intermediate to advanced talk on Cucumber where I covered a lot of what I have learned about Cucumber over the last year of using it. Cucumber has become an important part of my test suites because it allows me to test the experience of using my software. This talk covered some of the various command-line switches and cucumber.yml configuration options in the first section and then moves onto testing APIs and CLIs. I’ve found that testing both of these interfaces to my applications has helped tremendously in improving the application and at the same time providing a safety net for refactoring, which is exactly what I want from Cucumber. This talk is available as a PDF and was created using Keynote.

I appreciate the support from both of the audiences and the discussions that followed both talks and I look forward to the opportunity to visit Stockholm again in the not-to-distant future. Thanks as well to Peter Svensson for putting together dyncon and to Peter Lind for opening up the Valtech offices for my talk there.