June 2008
8 posts
1 tag
Screencast: Creating a website in Widgetfinger
Its been just under 2 months since we first launched Widgetfinger, and during that time we’ve had several hundred signups, some great feedback from users and customers, and we’ve continued to refine the product – focusing on how best to deliver on its core premise – being a simple content management for simple websites.
Over the weekend, I took the time to create a quick screencast showing the...
7 tags
Squirrel Updates for Rails 2.1, now with Named...
As a little follow up to the gotchas, I updated Squirrel. Its pagination is compatible with the latest will_paginate now. However, more important is the fact that you can use Squirrel blocks to build scopes:
User.scoped{ name.not =~ "Jon%" }.ordered.find(:all)
It works just like scoped does normally, but it lets you give Squirrel-style blocks. This lets you keep all your nice named_scope...
4 tags
I Will Miss You, Portland, Oregon
Basically all of thoughtbot went to Portland for RailsConf this year, and we had an awesome time. We also took a lot of photos, and put them on Flickr (see Eric Mill’s, Mike Burns’, and Tammer Saleh’s). Portland is an awesome city, thoughtbot is full of awesome people, and the Rails community has some gems of people in it too.
I guess RailsConf was a technical conference, but I don’t...
2 tags
Gotchas When Upgrading to Rails 2.1
We’ve upgraded several Rails 2.0 application to Rails 2.1 now, and we’ve compiled a list of little things to keep in mind as you upgrade. Hopefully this list will help you avoid banging your head against a wall.
Partial Updates
The updated_at and updated_on columns are NOT automatically updated on a #save on an AR object in Rails 2.1, unless another column has also changed. In each of the...
4 tags
Rules made up by you
Kelly Johnson worked at and was one of the driving forces behind Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works group. As part of an upcoming project management book I’ve been writing (it’s called “SWARM”, is meant for managers of small teams of software developers, and has a picture of bees on the cover), I’ve been reading up and thinking about the business processes which are in place at...
2 tags
Waiting For a Factory Girl
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction (From Fixtures)
Here at thoughtbot, we’ve had it with fixtures. Is Susie an admin? Which user
owns the “Exciting Test” post? Are there any categories without posts, or
should I add that fixture for this test? How did this post end up in the
future? Do you like asking these questions when writing tests? I don’t.
I also don’t like tests that don’t tell you...
Testing paperclip with Shoulda
Josh Susser had a bunch of great things to say about Shoulda in his RailsConf 2008 presentation, The great test framework dance-off. One of the parts he really liked was the conceptual simplicity of creating macros when drying up your tests.
It’s a misnomer to even call what you do with Shoulda “macros”, since they’re just normal class methods. Here’s one we use all the time for our projects...
Slides from RailsConf
On Sunday at 1:50 I had the pleasure of giving my talk Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring. Thank you to all who gave me the positive feedback afterward, I really appreciate it.
Here are the slides for the presentation.
If you enjoyed this presentation, please recommend me on Working With Rails.