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2015 Prepared Talk Proposals

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Finding data for research or coursework can be one of the most time intensive tasks for a scholar or student. We introduce GeoBlacklight, an open source, multi-institutional software project focused on solving these common challenges at institutions across the world. GeoBlacklight prioritizes user experience, integrates with many GIS tools, and streamlines the use and organization of geospatial data. This talk will provide an introduction to the software, demonstrate current functionality, and provide a road map for future work.
 
== Clueless-Driven Development: How I learned to migrate to Fedora 4 ==
 
* Adam Wead, awead@psu.edu, Penn State University
 
Recently I was tasked with migrating the content from our Fedora3 repository to the new Fedora4 repository architecture.
Despite a wealth of community support, I had no idea how to approach, or even begin to solve this problem. I knew I
wanted to follow best practices and use test-driven development to build my solution, but had no idea where to start.
Despite this initial setback, I was able to start writing tests with only a vague understanding of the problem. As my
tests exposed where my understanding of the problem was flawed, my code evolved, and within a week I had arrived at a
working solution that exhibited all the hallmarks of good testing and software design.
 
This talk recounts the process I went through from starting with practically nothing, to arriving at a working solution.
You can follow the rules of test-driven development, but you can write tests in an expressive way to describe the
problem instead of just describing what the code should do. It was also essential to begin testing from an integration
viewpoint as opposed to a unit one, because at the outset the units were unknown and were later realized through further
development. For the presentation, I will be demonstrating using RSpec and Ruby. All the code examples will be related
to the Hydra software stack; however, I hope to show that the processes at work will be applicable in any context.
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