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So, I’m speaking again at RubyConf this year. If I’m remembering correctly this will be the fourth RubyConf talk I give. I wonder where that ranks me? Someone really ought to maintain a leaderboard or something.

These days, my RubyConf proposal strategy is to submit the loopiest talk idea I can think of that is 1) interesting to me and 2) could possibly be worthy of talking about for an hour in front of more than a hundred people. Then if I get approved, I cobble the talk together with great effort, and tons of practicing. It works out, except for the fact that I’m sure my neighbors think I’m completely meshuggeneh by now, sitting in my apartment talking to myself about computers. People seemed to enjoy last year’s talk, at least.

This year’s talk is Testing Heresies. Obviously you’ve probably heard plenty of talks about testing but I hope to stir up the orthodoxy a little bit.

Now, the tricky thing about speaking at RubyConf these days is that there are multiple tracks, and there’s always a little competition for people to come see your presentation. You can see from the full agenda that I’m up against NeverBlock, trivial non-blocking IO for Ruby and Ruby Persistence in MagLev, both of which sound pretty great. But if I may indulge in a bit of cross-track smack talk: Yeah, those guys wrote some impressive code, but who’s gonna have funnier pictures?

Though I should offer a disclaimer, that so far, I have not yet thought of a way to have a slide involving the legal definition of “buttocks”. Working on it, though.