During a hallway conversation at CodeMash a few of us were telling war stories and/or fish tales about some of the coding horrors we’d seen over our careers. At one point the conversation was focused on code churn and compulsive refactoring. And then suddenly, without warning, I blurted out a single word that caused the entire discussion to screech to a halt. That word: refactorbation. When I looked around I saw a smile on nearly every face, but could tell that no one knew what I was talking about. And why would they... I didn’t...

I recently attended CodeMash, the biggest-little-conference around, and had a great time. While the sessions and content at the conference are first class, they aren’t what bring people back. Its the conference attendees, the hallway conversations, and the vibe that bring folks back and make the conference what it is. As a matter of fact, I only made it to a hand full of the sessions this year. Why? Because the rest of the time I was caught up in Open Spaces talks and adhoc conversations with wicked-smart guys like Dustin Campbell, Keith Elder, Bill Wagner,...

Tonight while working on some blog posts about CodeMash I decided to make use of a new Windows Live Writer plug-in, Insert XFN Link. In my post about becoming a more productive programmer I tagged a link to Jon Galloway's site with the XFN markup. I quickly realized that I didn't like the icon that Subtext's XFN Highlighter uses. So naturally I set to the web to find some alternatives. I came across some great icons for the XFN Microformat, and I just had to have them. Since they are licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license I pulled them down...

This past week at CodeMash I sat in on Neal Ford's The Productive Programmer session, and am I ever glad I did! This session shows you how to become a more productive programmer every day by using tools that you didn't know you already had. I would describe the session as a fast paced cookbook-style run down of tips and tricks to help recapture minutes (or even hours) a day that you would normally spend doing a lot of really mundane tasks. One of the best points Neal made was that our computers have some how turned the tables...

Today at CodeMash I had the opportunity to sit on Joe O'Brien's What makes Rails possible, an introduction to the Ruby language session. Let me just say... despite all of the hype, I'm really starting to get excited about the power (and other cool stuff) that dynamic languages like Ruby have to offer.  Joe did a really great job of giving us noobs a quick intro to not only the Ruby language, but also to why dynamic languages are so powerful, and how useful they can be. Naturally some of the attendees started to raise questions about Ruby's lack of static type checking...