BestTechVideos: Category Practices Videos

Tangible Functional Programming

scoundrel — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:13:50 GMT

Google Tech Talks
November, 7 2007

ABSTRACT

We present a user-friendly approach to unifying program creation and execution, based on a notion of "tangible values" (TVs), which are visual and interactive manifestations of pure values, including functions. Programming happens by gestural composition of TVs. Our goal is to give end-users the ability to create parameterized, composable content without imposing the usual abstract and linguistic working style of programmers. We hope that such a system will put the essence of programming into the hands of many more people, and in particular people with artistic/visual creative style.

In realizing this vision, we develop algebras for visual presentation and for "deep" function application, where function and argument may both be nested within a structure of tuples, functions, etc. Composition gestures are translated into chains of combinators that act simultaneously on statically typed values and their visualizations.

Speaker: Conal Elliott
Most of my research is aimed at supporting the creation of interactive synthetic media content, including computer animation, human-computer interaction, images, 2D and 3D geometry, and programmable shaders. In all cases, I aim to preserve or improve on the flexibility and performance of mainstream programming approaches, while greatly simplifying the creation process.

Synthetic media programs are almost always implemented in sequential, imperative (often object-oriented) languages. My research explores use of declarative languages, resulting in much simpler and more reusable and composable programs. These languages are also more amenable to execution on parallel architectures such as modern graphics processors, because declarative languages abstract away from order of execution, removing the accidental sequentiality found in imperative programs. Even on sequential machines, declarative formulations have much simpler mathematical semantics, which facilitates automatic optimization. They also tend to be spatially and temporally continuous (resolution-independent), allowing them to adapt naturally to machines with different speeds and display resolutions.

After exploring explicit programming of synthetic media content for several years, I'm now also keenly interested in supporting artists. The goal of my new new research agenda is to give artists access to the expressive power of computers and programming languages, while retaining an artist's working style. I mean "artist" in a broad sense, in contrast to the verbal and sequential style of an engineer. (I don't mean to suggest that people fit neatly into these two categories.) My ideal audience includes graphic designers, musicians, and children -- really, the playful and curious in all of us.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Conferences, Companies, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Science, Techtalks, Google, Lectures, Computer Science

RSpec Story Runner Top to Bottom Screencast

scoundrel — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:45:58 GMT

By Pat Maddox:

A couple people on the RSpec mailing list have mentioned that they would like to see a screencast tutorial that shows how to use Story Runner. I made one this afternoon showing how I use Story Runner to drive the development of a feature.

It's a bit funky at parts because it turns out I can't talk, type, and think all at the same time, I can only pick two.

Anyway, I hope it's helpful.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Ruby, Screencasts

APIs for parallel programming

scoundrel — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:13:23 GMT

Intel's James Reinders looks at Message Passing Interface (MPI), an API for parallelism.

Host: James Reinders Director, Intel Corporation

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Companies, Development, Broadcasting, Networking, Practices, Science, C and C++, Lectures, Computer Science

Foundations of parallel programming

scoundrel — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:10:56 GMT

Intel's James Reinders looks into the algorithms that form the heart of threading building blocks — a C++ template library for parallel programming.

Host: James Reinders Director, Intel Corporation

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Companies, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Science, C and C++, Lectures, Computer Science

Successful parallel programming

scoundrel — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:07:28 GMT

Intel's James Reinders presents some recurring themes for developers looking to improve their game when it comes to programming parallel systems...

Host: James Reinders Director, Intel Corporation

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Companies, Development, Practices, Science, Debugging, Lectures, Computer Science

"How I Learned to Love Testing" presentation

scoundrel — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:16:21 GMT

A few months ago I really hated the idea of testing my code, I just didn't do it. Now I couldn't think of writing a line of code without the proper tests in place.

If you fall into either of these boats you may want to watch this presentation I put together for the Orlando Ruby Users Group. Feedback and comments are always welcome.

Topic's Covered

Why would you test your code?
When do you test your code?
The path to developer enlightenment
Test Driven Development (TDD)
Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
Where'd RSpec come from?
Running Autotest with Growl
Live screencast of BDD with Rspec
What are stubs and mocks?
How to start testing your code?

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Conferences, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Ruby, Screencasts, Lectures

Ruby Hoedown 2007: Charity Workshop: Ruby and Rails Testing Techniques

scoundrel — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:30:27 GMT

The Ruby language is growing exponentially, partially because it offers more flexibility than other more common languages. All of that flexibility comes at a price: Ruby has no compiler to catch certain kinds of basic mistakes. Automated testing makes those disadvantages obsolete. Now, testing is firmly ingrained in the Ruby culture.

In this session, we'll cover Test::Unit, the standard Ruby distribution that has shipped with Ruby for years. We'll also catch the built-in testing frameworks for Ruby on Rails, but we'll also go beyond that well-travelled ground to show you how the best Rails shops in the world test. You'll see the in-favor frameworks for code coverage (RCov), mocking (FlexMock), behavior driven tests (RSpec), and even point-and-click integration tests with Selenium.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Conferences, Databases, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Ruby, Lectures, Q&A

MySQL Bay Area Community Meetup, May 2007

scoundrel — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:22:30 GMT

First video from the monthly proceedings of the Bay Area MySQL User's Group.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Conferences, Technologies, Companies, Databases, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Google, MySQL, Lectures

RailsConf'07 Keynote: David Heinemeier Hansson

scoundrel — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 03:23:36 GMT

With the release of Rails 1.2 we take a look back at David Heinemeier Hansson’s RailsConf keynote from Chicago.

In it, he outlines a number of issues that the Rails team was looking at as they moved towards the current release, the importance of opinionated software and of course, how he “learned to stop worry and love the CRUD.”

Here, briefly, is an outline of the talk:

Discovering Resources on Rails
Problem with Crud?
Get, Post and Clean URLs
Accounts, Controllers and Crud
CRUD is Not a Goal but and Inspiration
Controllers, Design Patterns and MIME
Doing By Hand Leads to Good Design
Get, Find, Post Redux
Q&A

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Web 2.0, Conferences, Technologies, Companies, Databases, Development, Broadcasting, Frameworks, Networking, Practices, AJAX, Web Services, 37signals, Ruby, Lectures, Ruby On Rails

Googel Developers Day US - Testing Distributed Systems

scoundrel — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 04:02:49 GMT

Testing Distributed Systems with AJAX, XML - Lessons Learned from Google Checkout
Martin Omander, Jason Huggins
Google Checkout is a good example of a distributed system involving several websites, the end user experience being powered by Ajax interactions, synchronous and asynchronous web services. Automating functional testing for that kind of architecture is a challenge. In this session we will provide an overview of the Google Checkout product and API, then present Mendoza, an open source testing framework that we use for functional testing of Checkout API integrations, using Selenium and a java test server. Mendoza has been designed in a generic way and can be leveraged to perform functional testing of any distributed system of similar architecture.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Want more on these topics?
Browse the archive of posts filed under Conferences, Technologies, Companies, Development, Broadcasting, Practices, Google Dev Day, AJAX, Web Services, Google, Debugging, Lectures, Q&A