Cluj.rb: Speeding up your testflow

After a long hiatus, Cluj.rb brought together Thomas Morris of http://www.badassvim.com/ and myself to talk about our development setup. The discussions was, naturally, succeeded by beers.

Here's the demo app, and below, the slides.

What happens after your 15 minutes of fame?

I had the pleasure to talk about product development at a Spart'up meetup organized by Simplon Romania. First time talking about ZenCash to a large group. It went surprisingly well!

©Nicolas Friess

The inflexion point of programming confidence (or an outline to the benefits of Rails)

I've been working as Rails developer at a startup for more than a year. It was quite a change from working at an outsourcing company, on a mammoth written in Fortran/C/C++, with legacy code coming back from the 80s.

When I started working with Rails it felt like "starting to watch a soap opera in the 7th season." I was reluctant to blog about the new things I was learning because I felt I'm not yet at a point in which I'm capable of insights into this world.

I recently watched a talk by Yehuda Katz and I was glad to see that I've came across most of the things which make the Rails approach to web development so beneficial. The following are taken from the said talk.

Startup Weekend Cluj: The great clipboard in the sky

Friday, first day of spring, 7:30 PM. 150 people in a wedding venue. The atmosphere was pretty dull. After walking in, I knew I wasn’t going to pitch. Not only that, but I was asking myself what I was doing there in the first place.

I had an idea, and I made a short presentation in my head in the previous days, which I polished it until it got to one minute. At first I didn’t know whether I wanted to present my idea or not, but I came to terms with myself that I will make a final decision when I’ll arrive at the event, depending on the atmosphere.

©SWCluj

“Pure cross platform file system.” It wasn’t an idea for a startup. Well, at that moment I didn’t even know what a startup was. I later found out... it’s an idea which longs to become a product. It’s not something exclusively tied to the IT world, only in our environment it’s relatively easy to come up with a prototype and do some market research. There’s one more essential thing: huge growth potential - index, spirals, segment - and other terminology I’m bewildered about.