Connecting ideas to code
So Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack have turned their podcasting talents towards making screencasts. They call them envycasts. I’m a regular listener of the podcast and enjoy their lighthearted style so when Gregg was looking for reviewers of their latested episode, I jumped at the chance.
I’m not going to cover all the Rails goodness present [...]
There’s an emphasis in the Rails community on testing as you write your code. So much so that the built in code generators will generate unit tests right alongside your models. You can even generate integration tests too.
So here we are, merrily generating models, controllers and more. We’re writing code, writing tests and even running [...]
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Filed under: Rails
Last time, I promised that we’d make our testimonial application more friendly for users and less so for spammers and that’s what we’re going to do today, among other things of course. Let’s get’r done!
Somehow, we overlooked the user’s name when we created the schema for the testimonial leaving us only the email address to [...]
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Filed under: Rails, walkthrough
While working on the Testimonial application, I needed a way to store application specific configuration details — the parts that are specific to a deployment: site name, url, etc. A quick search turned up the ApplicationConfiguration plugin which does exactly that, using YAML. It’s based on the technique described by Dmytro Shtefluk and uses [...]
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Filed under: Rails
Those guys over at 37signals have done it again and given us a nice shiny present for Christmas: Rails 2.0! Head on over to the Ruby On Rails weblog for the full details. The big feature for me is the debugger… it’s back! It’s just a
gem install ruby_debug
away! I’ll be [...]
Feature Branches
Martin Fowler has a good article on cherry picking features to compose a release. Check it out so that the next time your manager wants to pick and choose what to include in a release you’re ready with why it’s not that easy1 (0)
Finding style as an engineer
Very interesting article over at Stephano’s blog. Worth a read, and then another. Packed with links to useful tools too. (0)
Fixing bugs
Brad at 30sleeps writes about Death by a Thousand Service Packs. Well said, Brad and let us know what your itch is. (0)
Excellent paper on HTTP Sessions
Just finished reading a whitepaper on Web Based Session Management, worth a read. It lists the advantages and disadvantages of the three main forms of session management and common attacks.
Go forth and read! (0)
Stretchy Designs
If you’re afraid of using em-based layouts, or just haven’t got around to using them in your designs, head on over to Jon Tan’s blog and read his great article, The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS . He does a great job of demonstrating how easy it is to create an elastic layout in terms even engineers can understand. (1)
Is Google Evil? Here's Proof!
Many people wonder if Google is evil, despite their motto. But I have discovered proof that Google is Evil. See for yourself!
What's a Snow Flake?
There are times when I want to make a quick point without having to write an essay on the topic. Apparently there’s a whole meme of a blog within a blog, aka a sideblog or “asides”. I found a nice plugin that lets me do the same thing. I needed a name for this feature and since it’s just a little piece of Snowmoon Software, that “Snow Flake” would be a good name. Like it? Hate it? Leave a comment! (0)
