Why do we all know a developer who has been pounding out unmaintainable code for a decade or more? Why do people “believe in TDD but I don’t have time to write tests during crunch?” How is it that we have an entire industry based around rescuing teams from acutely awful Rails apps? It’s because on the job experience is a poor teacher; plateauing as soon as the developer is able to ship code that meets requirements.
Schools teach Computer Science which is only tangentially related to being a developer and most kata’s are approached incorrectly, giving no value at best, and reinforcing poor practices at worst. On top of all this, our pairs (for the lucky ones who pair program) probably have not shown us anything new in months. This presentation will give specific, concrete steps on how to slowly and steadily improve our game through practice and hard work. I’ll identify what skill Rails developers should be focusing on and walk the audience through how to target and eliminate these weaknesses so that nothing but white hot joy streams out of our fingers and into our apps. There’s no magic here, no secrets, and no hacks; just you and me working our butts off until we suck a little less.
Video producer: http://www.railsconf.com/
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