It’s been another year and I was once again abel to secure tickets to the excellent Developer! Developer! Developer! North conference, and was no disappointed. Once again, here are a few short notes about the sessions I attended.

A while back I completed an excercise to implement Conways Game of Life using Javascript. I have recently found a play by play on Pluralsight where Lea Verou did the same thing. I was especially interested, because Lea also chose to represent her grid using checkboxes. Although Lea’s implementation is undoubtably better I was, overall, happy with my own attempt, but one thing she did looked really good to me. Lea added a simple animation when the checked property changed to represent “birth”, so I’ve decided to shamelessly borrow this idea and to extend it to include an animation for “death” too.

I attended the Developer! Developer! Developer! North conference again this year, and was not disappointed. I took a notepad, but have already lost my notes, so no details at all this year!

One of the things I like to do in my spare time are Code Katas. For the uninitiated, code katas are simple exercises so you can practise coding. The exercise I have assigned myself is to create an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using Javascript.

A while back I was tasked with extending some existing export/import functionality to support Excel, in addition to Csv. I had my fingers crossed that the existing code used Josh Close’s excellent CsvHelper, and I was not disappointed.

I’ve recently had to introduce a certain number of unit tests into an existing product that was using Entity Framework model first. Fortunately, there is a wonderful library called Effort which allows you to abstract away your entire database with an in memory version. Without Effort, I would have been unable to add the tests I needed, due to the tightly coupled nature of the product.