Have you ever wanted a WYSIWYG-style toolbar that generates Textile markup? textile_toolbar is a Rails plugin that does just that. Extracted from a recent Terralien project, it’s a great way get your users used to the power and simplicity of Textile without frightening them away with long markup guides. Check … Continue reading
Here’s how to identify a keyword in a block of text using a case-insensitive regular expression, and surround that keyword with an HTML tag: text = “hello world, this is a test” text.gsub!(/(WORLD)/i, “\1”) The following string is produced: hello world, this is a test Note that \1 references the … Continue reading
I just released a new gem on GitHub that provides some common validation expectations to rspec. Instead of writing specs to verify that your models are handling validation correctly, these expectations simply check that the validation is getting declared correctly in your model. For example: describe User do it_should_validate_presence_of :first_name, … Continue reading
Raleigh’s first RubyCamp is coming to Red Hat on October 18th. This is a similar format to BarCamp in that the presentations are pitched the morning of the conference, and attendees self organize the remainder of the day. Relevance will be running their popular Refactotum workshop in the morning. The … Continue reading
Lindo renders the body of an HTTP response from inside a Rails functional or integration test. It used to be a plugin, but now it’s a gem. Why? Because Rails gems are the new hotness. Now go get it.
I’m at the Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville this weekend. Being around so many brilliant geeks encouraged me to release a gem I’ve had sitting in the hopper for several weeks. finder_filter encapsulates a pattern I find myself using quite frequently in Rails. Namely, looking up an instance variable before an … Continue reading
BarCampRDU 2008 came and went. It was quite enjoyable. There wasn’t as much grub as last year, but I thought the topics were more interesting. I gave a talk on pair programming during the afternoon. It really became more of a group discussion, which was exactly what I was hoping … Continue reading
Want to pick a certain set of key/value pairs from a Ruby hash? You might do this: hash = {:foo => “bar”, :bar => “baz”, :baz => “boo”} hash.select { |k,v| [:foo, :bar].include?(k) } # returns [[:foo, “bar”], [:bar, “baz”]] Kind of messy. We can do better by reopening the … Continue reading
I’ll be speaking at the Agile ITX conference in Reston, Virginia on June 27th. My presentation is titled Pragmatic Pair Programming and is based on the many diverse pairing experiences I’ve had over the past six years. Mention pair programming in any crowd of programmers and you’ll get two responses: … Continue reading