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
I attended my first Radiant hack night last week. We met at John’s apartment and spent several hours coding up new features for Radiant, which is an awesome Content Management System (CMS) built on Rails. Rick and John worked on a redesign of the admin backend, while Michael and I … Continue reading
Mark Mzyk gave a brief review of Career 2.0, the book by Jared Richardson that I contributed to, over on his blog. He also recommends The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler, another excellent career-boosting read. (If you’ve posted a review of Career 2.0 on your own blog, let me know.)
I released the initial version of my auto-session-timeout plugin for Rails at West End Ruby tonight. Have you ever wanted to force your users off your app if they go idle for a certain period of time? Many online banking sites use this technique. If your app is used on … Continue reading
I started building Fuelinator at the last West End Ruby meetup. The motivation behind the project was the lack of a decent system for tracking my business mileage. Existing apps like Fuelly and My Mile Marker make it unnecessarily difficult to enter mileage, and the statistics they produce just aren’t … 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
The date and venue for BarCamp RDU 2009 have been decided upon and registration is now open. Register early to ensure you have a seat. This is the fourth year of BarCamp and it just keeps getting better every year. The variety and quality of presentations last year was incredible. … Continue reading
Came across this interesting test failure after upgrading a project to Rails 2.2.2 earlier today: should route users’s ‘destroy’ action correctly The recognized options “show”, “id”=>”1”, “controller”=>”users”}> did not match “destroy”, “id”=>”1”, “controller”=>”users”}>, difference: “destroy”}> Turns out that rspec’s route_for method behaves differently when run against Rails 2.2+ due to … Continue reading
I’m in between projects right now and looking for some work to get me through the next month or so. Are you looking for a top-notch Ruby, Rails, or Java developer for your project? Drop me an email and let’s talk.