A friend of mine recently described why he feels ruby is immature. I, of course, disagree with him. There is much in ruby that could be improved, but the issues he raised are a) intentional design choices or b) weaknesses in specific applications built in ruby. Neither of those scenarios can be fairly described as [...]
Once you start using opensource at your day job you are going to want to improve it. Many improvements are going to be generally useful and should be contributed back to the community. A few of these changes may be quite specific and of no value to the community at large.
Changes that are generally useful [...]
I have been working pretty extensively with Cucumber for the last couple of weeks. In short, it is killer. You should be using it.
Having just RSpec/unit tests results in a lot of ugly trade offs between verifying the design and implementation of the parts (or units) vs the system as a whole. Using Cucumber completely [...]
If you are using a dynamic interpreted language please do not used use YAML1, or any other simple data serialization language, for configuration files.
Strictly speaking configuration is just data, of course, so you can use a data serialization language to represent your applications, or libraries, configuration. In some environments, like static compiled languages say, using [...]
A nucleic team is one with small core group of permanent employees, usually just 1 to 3 people, that is supplemented as needed by contractors. The core in a nucleic team is too small to do the anticipated work, even during slow periods of development. The core teams job is two fold, first it implements [...]
I am on the job market again.
If you needs some help exposing your applications functionality via REST web APIs, we should talk. If you need some assistance developing, deploying and managing a Ruby application, I have the skills you need. If you need someone that can learn your code base and your business processes, I [...]
Resourceful has its initial (0.2) release today.
Resourceful is a sophisticated HTTP client library for Ruby. It will (when it is complete, at least) provide an simple API for fully utilizing the amazing goodness that is HTTP.
It is already tasty, though. The 0.2 release provides
fully compliant HTTP caching
a framework for implementing cache managers (memory based cache [...]
I just released a small Emacs minor mode, rspec-mode
that provides some convenience functions related to dealing with
RSpec.
So far this minor mode provides some enhancements to ruby-mode
in the contexts of RSpec specifications. Namely, it provides the
following capabilities:
toggle back and forth between a spec and it’s target (bound to
\C-c so)
verify the spec file associated with the [...]
Marty Alchin recently posted about the “evils” of returning None (or nil or null depending on your language of choice). I think
he has it basically right. Sure
there are situations where returning nil1 is
appropriate, but they are pretty rare. For example, if a method
actually does what the client asked and there is [...]
Ara Howard has discovered that the ActiveRecord validation mechanism
does not ensure data
integrity.1 Validations feel
a bit like database constraints but it turns out they are really only
useful for producing human friendly error messages.
This is because the assertions they define are tested by reading from the
database before the changes are written to the database. As you [...]
