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.

The day after Spletne Urice #106 I spent the whole day at Web::INDUSTRIJA 2009, a small trade fair in Zagreb, Croatia.

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.

For more information and images, take a look at the article on linux.hr, and there is also a few twitter posts.

At BarCamp Zagreb 2009 after my Watir talk Jure Cuhalev asked me if I will present Watir it in Ljubljana (Slovenia) at Spletne Urice, weekly gathering of Slovenian geeks held in Kiberpipa. Of course, I said: “Yes!”.

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.

I few days ago I was at BarCamp Zagreb 2009. I wanted to talk about Taza, “an opinionated browser-based test framework”. I heard about it at AWTA 2009 and I wanted to learn more about it, and giving a talk is a great way to learn. I did not have enough time to prepare my presentation, so I had some broken code even when I got there. I decided to skip a few presentations until I fix it.

I am sorry I skipped Ivica Kartelo talking how he became the most important person in Croatian web industry. I was outside of the room where he had his talk and the people were laughing so loudly I had a hard time concentrating on my broken code.

I fixed the code just in time to see Mislav Marohnić talking how marketing and $$$ are great, but some of us create code. He shared some tools his team uses.

The next slot was marketing talks in both rooms, so I skipped it and tried to concentrate for my talk, because I was next.

The same as at BarCamp Zagreb 2008, I have chosen the smaller room (there were two rooms, smaller and bigger), because I knew there will be just a few people interested in testing and Watir there. To my great disappointment, I was not able to connect my computer to the projector. I moved my presentation to organizers’ computer, but I was not able to show the code and run it. I invited interested to come and see it at my computer, but the time was up. I said I will show them the code and how it runs outside, but then I guess I forgot to do it, because I do not remember showing the code to anybody. Maybe no one was interested.

I do not think my talk made a lot of sense to people. I asked how many were familiar with Ruby or Watir and saw just a few hands. I guess a talk about testing framework would be too much for the crowd like that. I gave my introduction to Watir talk last year, and organizers kindly said it would be better to do something else this year, so I choose Taza. Maybe that was not such a great move.

This is my presentation. I hope I will have some time in the near future and update it with the code.

After my talk two people approached me. Alex (American living in Italy, or Italian living in US, or some other more complicated combination) asked some general questions about Watir, and Jure Čuhalev asked if I would talk about Watir in Ljubljana, Slovenia. That was a surprise. I am all for it! I hope we will be able to arrange it in the next few weeks.

I planned to skip the next slot, because there were again two marketing talks. Also, I got a call from my ruby-hr team to join them for a beer. It was to crowded at their table, so a few of us sat separately and had a nice talk.

After the break I heard Ivan Guštin asking us why didn’t we still switch to Linux desktop. Interesting talk about advantages of Linux desktop. I was using Linux at home for years. Then I got Windows machine from my company. I used that for years. Recently I got a mac from my company. Now I use that. I like open source. I just do not care about operating systems. They are just a tool. I use what I have.

Next I saw Goran Peuc destroying the interface. Interesting talk about good and bad interfaces, and how the interface should be minimal.

Vlatko Kosturjak was talking about Open Web Application Security Project. It is always interesting to hear security ninjas talk.

Zoran Dominković talked about sharing and privacy on the internet. That got me thinking. I share a lot, but I try to keep some privacy. I hope I am choosing the right mixture.

Vlatko Kosturjak talked how he used favicon.ico to get statistical data what software is used on the internet. Very interesting approach.

Stjepan Zlodi was talking about development for small screens. They are gaining popularity because of phones with browsers and netbooks. I have been reading his blog for years. I wanted to introduce myself and just say hi after the talk, but I guess I forgot (the same as the last year).

The last talk was Goran Peuc on banks blocking development of web design. He showed us some horrible internet banking web applications that Croatian banks have. So true. Also, he talked about redesign of insurance site his company just finished.

To sum up, it was great to see some interesting talks, and to talk about Watir once again. Still, networking is the best part of such (un)conferences.

AWTA 2009 was a lot of fun. At Notes from AWTA 2009 you can find a lot of images, notes, podcasts, blog posts, presentations, twitter feed…

It was great to finally meet in person a lot of people I knew on-line for years. I have learned a lot how other people test. Also, Austin and Texas were very interesting to explore. I think all is already said about AWTA 2009. I just hope I will be there the next year too.

AWTA 2009 Sunday

Blogging again!

I had to travel a long way to get to AWTA 2009 in beautiful Austin, Texas.

To see what is going on, the best place is #awta Twitter channel.

I am twittering, posting images, blogging and podcasting like crazy.

AWTA 2009 Friday

The second Ruby on Beers happened yesterday. About 15 of us appeared, much more than I expected.

We were talking about Heroku, Git and Watir.

We did not have the time to talk about Unicode and RSpec, so we will talk about it the next time. There was interest in talking about Rubinius.

The next Ruby on Beers will probably happen at the same place (Multimedijalni institut, net.kulturni klub mama, Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb), at Saturday May 31st 2008 at 5 pm.

I saw something that I could not get out of my head since. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In short, rent Linux machines $.10/hour (hour is the smallest time unit).

I could use this for testing. I could really use this.

At the moment I test with one machine that has enough CPU and RAM to open one VMware image with application I test running inside. I have six independent test suites for the application, and it takes about an hour to run them all sequentially inside the image.

I could speed it up. I could rent 6 machines and run all tests in about 10 minutes. Since I must pay for the whole hour, it would cost me about $.60. I am not in such a hurry every day, but there are days where such speed in executing tests would make a difference.

The only problem is that my application and my tests run on Windows. But since it is VMware image, I can run it on Linux.

Now, let me day dream for just a minute.

Amazon starts to bill by the minute (or second). While I am dreaming, they also lower the prices. I fragment my test suites, so every takes about a minute (or less). I could rent as many machines I need and be done with testing in an minute. Of course, it is all done automatically. Every time a developer commits new code, a machine is automatically rented, set up for testing, multiplied (so I do not have to spend time powering up, getting new application code, building it, getting new test code…).

I will really have to check this out in detail.

The first Ruby on Beers meeting happened last Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at lake Jarun, Zagreb, Croatia (map).

Ruby on Beers is informal gathering of Ruby users. It all started at ruby-hr Google group (in Croatian) that came to life after the first BarCamp Zagreb where we realized that there are more than one Ruby user in the near (as I thought before Barcamp).

The four of us appeared. Branimir Šloser, Saša Branković, Mislav Marohnić and me.

We enjoyed excellent Tomislav beer and discussed the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and more specifically, what to do next.

The next meeting should be on Saturday, May 10th, 2008. I hope I will be able to talk about Watir, and there are rumors that there will be something said about Git and Unicode. Only the time will tell.

More details at Ruby on Beers official page.

If you are in the near, please drop by.

Thanks to Chris McMahon for the title.