CodeMash Day 1 Morning
CodeMash has started out with a bang for me, as I missed the first half of Neal Ford's Keynote on Software Engineering and Polygot Programming because I thought it started at 9 rather than the actual starting time of 8. The best part was I didn't oversleep, I was up in plenty of time, just didn't put my reading comprehension skills to work to read the start time of the keynote.
So, the last half of Neal's talk was excellent. (Referencing ORMs as programming's "Vietnam" was fun to witness.)
Following the keynote, I headed off to Testing Mandatory, a session given by Joe O'Brien about testing in Ruby. Solid session, and makes me want to learn Ruby that much more. Joe kind of shoots from the hip, but the message gets through. The biggest message was how easy testing is in Ruby, that it's built in from the beginning. He also provided a good idea on how to learn Ruby: Take one of the libraries and write unit tests for it.
The last morning session I headed to Intro to Castle with Jay Wren. Jay's pretty accomplished in Castle, so knows the material well. However, from my headbanging with Castle during my current project with trying to wedge it in our existing code base gave me all the intro that Jay was laying out. He did go more into MonoRail, so that was good, but I'm guessing my first trip into MVC land on ASP.Net will be with Microsoft's release of the same.