David Bock

Presentations

Building Workflow Applications with StonePath

Stonepath is a workflow modeling methodology with its roots in a long-running Java project at the U.S. State Department. Starting with techniques for deriving requirements/user stories from your users, user interface patterns, state-and-task based workflow modeling, and some domain modeling ideas, you can build comprehensive 'Enterprise' applications for managing aspects of workflow and group coordination.

In this session we will look at the elements of StonePath. We will work through an example application, modeling the flow of various kinds of work through an example 'back office' application, and look at several real-world applications based on these ideas.

Building Maintainable Javascript with Coffeescript

CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath all of those embarrassing braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, and runs in every JavaScript implementation.

In this session we will look at Coffescript, write some coffeescript code, and analyze the generated Javascript. We will look at how we can use it in our existing web development stack, seamlessly compiling the coffeescript into Javascript so it works in our development environment. We will also look at seamlessly using existing Javascript libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous, and JQuery.

Metrics for steering your projects to success

There are a lot of things we can measure about our source code, but what about the "project as a whole" and its overall health? Are there ways of measuring the effectiveness of our processes? Are there things we can measure that would point to project automation wins? Is there a way to measure team 'morale'?

While we can gather a lot of metrics from automated source inspection tools, those can make us focus on the wrong "problems to solve"... There are a lot of personal, team, and project-level things we can measure and tune that can lead to big wins. Using advice from an obsessive-compulsive numbers collector, the Personal Software Process, Scrum, the Pomodoro Time Management Technique, and Personal Kanban, we will discuss ways of effectively measuring aspects of our team and our productivity, and actions we might take based on what we learn.

Building Semantic CSS with Compass and SASS

Compass is a tool that can help you build cleaner, better structured, and less error-prone CSS. Semantic CSS is a technique where your CSS vocabulary describes WHAT things are on your page, rather than WHERE they are. Together, this tool and this concept can radically improve the structure of your html.

With compass, your CSS is written in a CSS superset called SCSS which can include variables, math, and method calls that evaluate to CSS. The end result is pure CSS - so you don't need to worry about anything 'funny' on the browser side. This lets us write cleaner CSS that documents the intent of our design, not just the 'end result'.