July 2008
10 posts
Ride the toad
As previously alluded to – we are pleased to formally launch Hoptoad today. We’ve been using the service on various internal and client applications that we maintain over the last six months, and have watched with pride as our tadpole of an error catching web service has matured into the crazy toad that it’s become. It’s been sort of like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, though I can’t describe in exactly...
Testing named_scope
We’re huge fans of NamedScope here at Thoughtbot. It does wonders for finder reuse and clarity. Unfortunately, it also creates a large number of finders that all must be tested, where the old method may have only created one.
To help out with the testing of simple named_scope definitions, we added a helper to Shoulda, should_have_named_scope:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
named_scope...
Welcome to Ryan McGeary as the first Shoulda...
I’ve mentioned before that being the main person with commit rights on Shoulda has resulted in a serious bottleneck in getting the community’s contributes into trunk. The contributions we’ve been getting have all been high quality, but we needed to find someone who consistently produced exceptional work – someone we could trust to make good decisions about which changes were both well...
5 tags
A HTTP testing proxy
Hoptoad—which is now live—is both an application and a Rails plugin that must work together. This integration simply cannot go untested in a test-happy place like
thoughtbot.
The plugin, I’m sure you’ve seen, has a private method #send_to_hoptoad that handles the dirty HTTP stuff. It looks like a more complicated version of this:
def send_to_hoptoad(data)
url =...
Little green friend
Here’s a brief introduction to a new application we’ve been working on. The application is called hoptoad, and it’s a hosted web service which can be used as an error reporting and analysis tool by Rails applications. The service is running in the Engine Yard cloud and will be completely free when it launches, so go ahead and sign up to that mailing list and we’ll let you know when it’s...
7 tags
Jester In The News
Jester is seeing a little action nowadays. The Google Code Blog has a post today about Google Gears on Rails, a Rails plugin by Michael Marcus and Rui Ma, that extends Jester to wrap over Google Gears. It effectively lets your controllers read and write directly to your users’ machines, so they can use your app offline. Check out the install and usage instructions for details, and listen to the...
11 tags
Regulators!!! Mount up
In my constant quest to REST up web apps and create a better world for our children and our children’s children, I’ve started to use “nested” controllers to create a local namespace/hierarchy in the controllers of our Rails apps. The pattern here is simple. Let’s say you have a User model and an Article model. User has_many articles. You need to have both a global “all articles” page and a...
6 tags
Getting Strong Now
We’re psyched to have been selected to give a 6 hour training session, thoughtbot’s Rails Best Practices at the Lone Star Ruby Conference, September 4-6, 2008 in Austin, TX.
Tammer, Jon, Jared, Dan, Matt, and myself will be the trainers. With 6 of us, there will be a lot of hands-on training, and we hope that you can attend.
Flying High Now
We’ve been exploring the idea of...
6 tags
Command Line Basecamp
I log a lot of friggin’ time on Basecamp. We all track our time incessantly here; for client work, product development, R&D, conference calls, whatever. This means I spend a lot of time logged into Basecamp, with my browser up, typing in times and tabbing between form inputs.
UNTIL RECENTLY!!!
While I wouldn’t call myself a command line “junkie”, I have grown to appreciate the brevity with...
5 tags
How I learned to stop floating and love the...
Floating columns is a typical approach to defining page layout. The obvious issue with floating columns is clearing said floats. When you start dealing with the details of auto-clearing elements and browser inconsistencies, you might start to desire an alternate approach.
Clearing issues & browser inconsistencies aside, floating is not the natural way to define layout. Floating is intended...