While at Music City Code in Nashville last month I had the privilege of recording an episode of the Eat Sleep Code Podcast with Ed Charbeneau. It’s been posted to SoundCloud and you can check it out now. It should show up in iTunes and places like that in a couple of days.

Apparently, I talked about Putting the D&D in TDD, refactoring, and all sorts of stuff. But, really, it’s all just a blur. Go check it out and tell me what I said! Thanks!

I have been selected to present jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions at Prairie.Code() this year. And, George Walters and I will be Putting the D&D in TDD for a whole new mess of Midwesterners.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Des Moines and I’m really looking forward to it. I used to travel there quite a bit when I worked for Nationwide. The food was great, the people were friendly, and the traffic was light. I’m especially looking forward to checking out the The Forge that my employer, Pillar, has built there. Should be a good time.

So, if you find yourself in the area or you’re someone from back in the Nationwide days, look me up. I’m always happy to chat!

George Walters and I will once again be Putting the D&D in TDD. This time it’s at Music City Code in Nashville. We’ll be presenting and facilitating all day on August 18th. If you’re in the area, come and check it out.

I spoke at StirTrek a few weeks ago and they did me the service of recording my talk. It is entitled jQuery & 10,000 Global Functions: Working with Legacy JavaScript and I present it here for your perusal.

The talk consists of a discussion on where legacy code comes from, some good strategies for dealing with it, some bad strategies to avoid, and lots of specific techniques more specific to JavaScript.

The slides for this talk are on SlideShare and, given that there is a lot of code on them, they might be a handy reference. Check ‘em out.

In preparation for this talk I put together an exercise foolishly thinking I might have time during the talk to actually do some coding to provide some more concrete examples. I ran out of time but the exercise is still out there if you want to practice some of these techniques.

I also plan to record a series of screencasts where I show off some of these techniques against this repository. Watch for those here or on my YouTube channel.

I find myself back in ruby land for a bit and it was time to help some of my co-workers get RVM running on Mavericks. Having recently figured this out (and needing to share it with more co-workers) I figured I’d share it with everyone.

These instructions will show you how to install RVM on Mavericks for a single user. And, it’s all pretty easy so no worries. We can handle this.

First off, make sure you don’t already have RVM. Just look in your home directory and make sure there is not a folder called .rvm.

$ ls ~/.rvm
ls: /Users/guy/.rvm: No such file or directory

If there is a folder called, this you can either remove it (scorched earth, baby!) rename it, or go find another blog post on how to repair it.

Now, install RVM.

$ \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Once this is done you can verify everything is installed by checking the .rvm folder.

$ ls ~/.rvm
...lots of stuff...

Hooray! It’s installed. But it doesn’t work. Well, that’s because we ain’t done. You also need to add some stuff you the end – and this is import – the end of your startup scripts. If RVM finds that it is not at the top of the $PATH environment variable it’ll work but nag you like an old lady. Just put it as the end.

I put them in .bashrc but you might put them in .bash_profile. Just make sure they are the last thing to execute. Remember. Old lady.

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.rvm/bin

Once you do that, open a new terminal and install some rubies.

Enjoy!