RUG::B

How do you communicate with a computer?

A vast amount of human-computer communication happens through structured data. There’s markup languages like Markdown and HTML, data interchange formats like JSON and XML, and programming languages like Ruby and JavaScript.

As a series of characters, data in such formats and languages mean nothing to a computer. To give the data meaning, a program called a parser needs to interpret the data and convert it into a meaningful structure.

Writing a parser is fun, and it is a good skill to have. This talk will explain how it works.

gitter is like chat for GitHub and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a very old and efficient way to communicate with text. The usage of IRC is very powerful and the suitable tool if you are a person who lives in the terminal. gitter has a nice user interface, it's easier to use (just sign with your github credentials and you are ready) and saves your chat history.

Learn in this talk how you can take synchronize message either written in IRC or gitter - it doesn't matter which tool you use.

Test suite and code it tests are in fact symmetry of each other: both are double checks of each other.

Therefore it should be possible to derive tests from the code as much as it is possible to derive code from the tests one test at a time.

This is not a pleasant process of course. But turns out that there are techniques that allow one to derive tests one at a time from the code with full confidence and in small increments until there is nothing else to test.

I want to tell you about one such technique and my experiences of using it.