Dave Aronson

Fairfax, VA USA

Bio

Dave is a semi-retired software development consultant (writing code and giving advice on processes, tools, etc.), with 36 years of professional experience in a wide variety of languages, systems, frameworks, techniques, domains, etc. He is the T. Rex of Codosaurus, LLC (his one-man consulting firm, which explains how he can get such a cool title, at http://www.Codosaur.us/) near Washington, DC, USA.

His latest passion project is to perfect and spread ACRUMEN, his simple but nearly comprehensive definition of Software Quality. See https://www.codosaur.us/ACRUMEN for details. He is writing a book on it for developers, and another book for recruiters on how to hire developers.

He has spoken at conferences, user groups, etc., about Mutation Testing (the software kind, not biology), ACRUMEN (see above), “gotchas” in the Ruby programming language, some differences between Functional and Object Oriented programming, basic online security, spam prevention, breaking into conference speaking (how meta!), making mead, and many other topics.

My Talks

Drink like a [...] Viking: The History and Making of MEAD!

Mead is enjoying a resurgence, thanks in part to online games. People have heard of it, and want to know more. They would be entertained to know where it came from (not what most think!), some v...

How the Veloci-Ractor Lost its GILs

You know what a pain in the proverbial posterior Ruby's GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) is. Ruby 3.0 added Ractors, which deftly sidestep the GIL to allow true parallelism. This talk goes into what...

Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing)

Is all your code meaningful, or is some redundant or unreachable? Are your tests strict, or do they let code get away with undesired behavior? Mutation Testing helps root out these problems. This t...

Ruby Gotchas!

One reason we love Ruby is the "Principle of Least Surprise". But there are still many ways Ruby can surprise us. Some are good, some not so much. This talk warns you about Ruby's lurking "gotch...

Test your Docs, and Doc your Tests

Do the examples in your documentation get out of date? Are the examples in your tests hard to understand? Do you wish you could combine them? In some languages, you can! This talk is about doct...

Whose Line of Code Is It Anyway?

This talk is a hands-on demo of Ping-Pong Pair Programming, a technique that combines TDD and pairing, in a fun way. The audience has some opportunities to participate, but the shy ones don't need...

Why We Prepend

Did you switch from an object-oriented or imperative language, to a functional one, and find it hard to adjust to prepending to lists instead of appending? And wonder why? It all makes sense when...

Woof woof woof? Bark bark grrrrr!

Woof woof, bark grrrowl aWOOOoooo? Yipe yipe yipe yipe! Sniff sniff sniff sniff... growl?! Ruh-ro! Pant pant pant pant pant pant pant, whiiiiine! Woof bark, bark bark bark woof meow, er, I mea...

Write Better Software with ACRUMEN

Do you write high quality software? Without a good definition of software quality, you can't even know! ACRUMEN is a new definition I've invented, based on six aspects. I’ll explain why we need ...

You Wanna Say Somethin'?

Many of the audience would love to come up on stage and give a talk of their own - but they don't know how to find openings and submit a talk, or how to give a speech, or they're scared, or they do...