October 2008
12 posts
4 tags
Design evolution - from weak to solid
As a designer, it’s possible to nail a design on the first try, but typically, there is an evolutionary process involved. In the case of a recent redesign of Folkstory.us, the process went longer than intended, but the initial mockup and final mockup bear enough resemblances to make for an interesting animated journey. The first mockup failed to knock any socks off whatsoever; however, as...
3 tags
We've turned our subversion server off
As we announced quite a while ago we moved all of our plugins to github. Since then, we’ve moved all of our client work (where we provide the source code repo) to github as well.
We had kept our subversion server online, with nothing being updated on it (all updates were in git), but earlier today we shut it down completely. If, for some reason, you were still using the subversion instance...
Hoptoad Downtime Sunday at Midnight
Hoptoad has been growing like a little toddler – each set of shoes proving too small for the next. In just ten months, our database has collected almost 7 million errors, and has grown to 73GB (that’s 19,136,512 words for you old-schoolers out there).
Because of this, we have to schedule a teensy weensy little DOWNTIME this weekend on Sunday at midnight for about half an hour while we...
1 tag
Rails Rumble 2008 Entries
As we’ve hinted at in a few of our recent posts, we participated in this year’s Rails Rumble. Three teams had thoughtbot team members on them, and we had another team working in our office. Since voting has now started, we encourage you to sign up to vote and check out all the apps.
Wheres the Milk At?
A site that helps you find the cheapest place to buy groceries near you, based on your...
6 tags
Simple Test Metrics in Your Rails App, and What...
There are two, low barrier to entry ways to get some quick metrics about your application’s test code and the coverage it provides. Of course there are others, but today we’re just going to focus on the two that are easiest to run and on what they mean: rake stats and rcov.
The first tool available to us comes built into Rails, and that’s rake stats.
rake stats
If you haven’t used it before,...
7 tags
The Accept: header vs. #caches_page
In this example we’re going to have an XML API on FontsController#index. A GET to /fonts.xml will produce a list of every Font in the database, along with all its information (name, thumbnail, a list of ligatures, price, license, and so on).
This is a long list. Luckily it’s just for the API consumers. The normal HTML people just request /fonts and this gives them a paginated view of...
6 tags
Suspenders
Introducing Suspenders, the thoughtbot Rails template.
Install
To create a new project, checkout the github repository and run:
./script/create_project projectname
This will create a project in ../projectname. You should then follow the instructions on Github to upload that project there. This script creates an entirely new git repository, and is not meant to be used against an...
1 tag
Non-test code is trivial
I have heard—and been in the middle of—arguments which make the claim that the tests is the stupid, simple part and the “real code” is the hard part. One such person made the claim that interns should write the test code and “real programmers” should write code to make the tests pass.
This is backwards.
The tests are the program. Without the tests, the program does...
Life in the fast lane
You ever write a named_scope and think “hey framework, I already wrote a schema – why are you bothering me with all this work?!”
What about those times when you’re sitting behind the wheel of your ride and the warning flag is up because Johnny gave Jimmy a little too hard of a bump around turn number three and you are left wondering just how fast you should go? I mean sure you’re worried...
Thoughtbot & Hashrocket, sitting in a tree...
Hashrocket recently honored Joe Ferris (no relation) and I by an invitation to come down to Jacksonville Beach, Florida to work on one of their 321 Launch projects as guest star programmers.
Chris O’Sullivan actually did an amazingly accurate job of describing the project from a technical point of view by doing an impressively detailed analysis of our github commits and...
2 tags
Rails Training at Rockefeller Center, NYC
We’re happy to announce that registration is now open for our next Advanced Ruby on Rails training class.
<p>This one is in New York City at <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1230+Avenue+of+the+Americas,+New+York+City,+NY">Rockefeller Plaza Center</a> on Friday, December 5th, 2008.</p>
<p><img src="http://ui.thoughtbot.com/assets/2008-10-7-rock.jpg"...
4 tags
Custom Tags in Liquid
We recently rolled out a new feature in Widgetfinger that allows you to quickly build navigational menus
{% navigation %}
{% link About %}
{% link Services %}
{% link Contact %}
{% endnavigation %}
The above tags will create the following navigation HTML.
<ul id="navigation">
<li class="about"><a href="/about">About</a></li>
<li...