This year’s Ruby Hoedown is happening in Nashville again on September 3rd and 4th. I’m really looking forward to attending. The quality of the talks combined with the smaller attendance size makes for some great hallway conversations. Last year’s Hoedown was at the Opryland hotel which was a stellar venue. … Continue reading
This year’s RubyConf is being held in New Orleans on November 11th – 13th. Count me in. I’ve only driven through the area once so it’ll be interesting to make a longer visit. Although I’m ultimately keeping my fingers crossed for a Raleigh RubyConf one of these days. Hey, I … Continue reading
If anyone still happens to be using test_spec, you’ll be thrilled to know that the test_spec_on_rails plugin is now compatible with Rails 2.3. It has also been converted to a gem. Install with: Add to your Rails app’s test.rb like so: Enjoy the goodness of test-spec helpers from inside your … Continue reading
On a recent project, I had to implement a CSV parser that would gracefully handle malformed files. I’m talking about files with unescaped quotes, wacky UTF-8 chars, and various other abominations of nature. I originally assumed FasterCSV would handle this automagically, but it turns out that the library’s most commonly … Continue reading
The time zone warp code I posted about last week is now a gem: To configure in your Rails app, add this line to the bottom of test.rb: You can also fork the code from the project on GitHub.
One of my Rails projects makes heavy use of time zones. I’ve run into some issues writing good tests for this type of thing. In particular, I’ve needed my tests to run within a time zone outside my own. But I don’t want to permanently change the time zone within … Continue reading
I’ll be giving a presentation about Prawn at this month’s raleigh.rb meetup. Prawn is a Ruby gem that enables fast PDF generation. It is a dramatic improvement over previous libraries like PDF::Writer. It can be used standalone or inside your Rails applications. The markup is powerful and relatively painless to … Continue reading
Jared Richardson just posted a series of interviews in anticipation of the upcoming RubyRX/AgileRX conference taking place in Reston, Virginia in September. In my interview we discuss iPhone development, MacRuby, Git, and testing frameworks. I’m really looking forward to presenting again at RubyRX. I’ll be giving two talks this year. … Continue reading
Lindo helps you write and verify Rails functional and integration tests by opening the HTTP response body in the default browser for inspection. This can be a real time-saver when you’re trying to figure out why your assert_select or have_tag calls aren’t passing. In its initial version, Lindo assumed that … Continue reading
Ruby arrays have this handy method called transpose which takes an existing 2-dimensional array (i.e. a matrix) and flips it on its side: >> a = [[1,2], [3,4], [5,6]] >> puts a.transpose.inspect [[1, 3, 5], [2, 4, 6]] Each row becomes a column, essentially. This is fine and dandy for … Continue reading