Last week I was at DORS/CLUC 2009. It is three day open source conference in Zagreb, Croatia.
The first day I had a lightning talk titled something like: How did delivering our web application to client look like before we automated tests and how it looks today? It was just an introduction to my Watir talk the next day.
The talk was a lot of fun. I really like to show off how Watir is useful, easy to use and, of course, just cool. This was the first time I did some live Watir coding using Linux and Firewatir and I had some problems, but nothing serious. (I usually use Windows and Watir::IE.)
Also, this was the first time I had a workshop (about 3 hours). We spent a few hours doing some basic Watir tests.
It was nice to see what other people are doing and to meet some familiar faces. There was a lot of intersting presentations, and also a lot of presentations that were a bit boring to me. The usual. The best presentation was by Dobrica Pavlinušić on freeing hardware. Topic not really interesting to me, but Dobrica is just the funniest presenter I have seen so far.
There is Twitter #dorscluc channel, Flickr dorscluc2009 tag and #dorscluc channel at irc.freenode.net projected by one projector all the time.
Nice people from linux.hr got a booth there and asked a few local open source groups if they would like to join them. One of the groups they asked was a group I am member of, ruby-hr (Ruby Croatia).
I planned to be there a few hours, but my boss said it is fine with him if I spend the whole day there, so I went for that option.
There was about ten booths, a pretty small trade fair. Linux.hr team were handing out some Ubuntu CDs, and since I do not know anything else, I was showing people how Watir works. I guess I showed Watir to about 10 people that day. Not bad.
Since Ubuntu has live CD, I tried it on my Mac, and it worked fine. Wireless was not working, and Linux gurus said that Ubuntu probably does not have drivers for my hardware.
There is also a funny story. I was entering the fair and saw a big penguin walking around. Of course, it was one of the linux.hr team, so he approached me and said to follow him to our booth. So, I am walking behind a giant penguin, and at the entrance they ask me if I have a ticket. I said: “I am with the penguin“, and to my surprise they just let me in. I newer thought that knowing a penguin can get you any benefits.
Slovenian and Croatian (my mother tongue) are similar, but not similar enough to understand each other, so the talk was in English.
About ten people arrived for the talk, as I expected, but it was a bit more formal that I expected. They pointed reflectors at me, gave me a microphone and said they are recording audio and video, and that there is live video stream. In about a week there should be video file of my talk on their site. As I understood, they also prefer to ask questions at the end of the talk, but I prefer when questions are asked during the talk. It makes it more dynamic. I do not think that the purpose of a talk is to show all slides and say what I prepared, but to answer people’s questions, even if it moved the talk in the direction I did not plan it to go.
I talked a bit about Watir first, and then about Taza, as an example of Watir framework. I chose Taza among other frameworks simply because it had the best documentation.
As I like to do it, most of my talk was live coding. I would like to thank Marko Mrdjenovič for holding the microphone while I was coding. My live coding went pretty well while I was in pure Watir, but when I switched to Taza (I am not really familiar with it) I had some problems. With some luck and help from the audience, I was able to get to the end of my Taza example.
After the talk, I took a look (and a few pictures) at their museum of old computers. Most of them are functional and powered up, as you can see from the pictures. They even have my first computer, Sinclair ZX Spectrum. If you looked really closely, you would see a tear in my eye while I was looking at it. I spent a lot of time playing with it (while I was a kid, not in the museum).
After the museum I joined the rest of the people in a bar where they were drinking beer, but I had to drink tea, because I had to drive for almost two hours to get home. We had a nice but short chat, because it was getting late and I had to head home.
My slides are here:
For my reference, these are links to Spletne Urice #106 at Spletne Urice and Kiberpipa sites.
Update: audio and video of my talk now available at kiberpipa.org.
This was the first time I did some live Watir coding using Linux and Firewatir and I had some problems, but nothing serious. (I usually use Windows and Watir::IE.)
