Monthly Archives: September 2007

EC-TEL’07 Conference report

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(Sissi, Crete, Sept 17th 2007)

The 2007 European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning is only celebrating it’s second birthday yet it already had 116 submissions and an acceptance rate lower then 25%. The conference, which is primarily a gathering of PhD students and researchers from around Europe, brings together adaptive hypermedia, data mining, semantic web and social software researchers interested in ‘enhancing’ traditional learning methods. Themes included Web 2.0 & social software, informal learning and workplace & industrial learning. The location, a sun-baked Creteian holiday resort, was quoted by several attendees as being too good (looking out at the clear turquoise sea made it hard to concentrate on the presentations).
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Writing Effective Javascript Code (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Unit Test)

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Like most programmers I feel there are always ways of improve my coding skills. Whether it’s the perennial ‘write more documentation’, gain a better understanding of my current programming language or even just adopt a good programming style. Recently our company had a staff development week and I took this opportunity to pursue some of these interests. My main focus was on Unit Testing and after a week spent delving into this world I emerged with a new found enthusiasm for testing techniques, better confidence in my own skills (thanks to the tests I wrote) and a desire to spread the word.

The following entry is from a presentation I gave to my fellow ILRT programmers which covers some of the javascript tips and tricks I discovered on the web to help me (and others) become a better programmer. I conclude with some information on testing javascript applications using JSUnit and Selenium Core.

(I appologise for the layout but after several hours spent fighting with WordPress I’ve given up nicely trying to format everything)
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