March 2009
13 posts
8 tags
2009 Rubyist's guide to a Mac OS X development...
My hard drive kicked the bucket recently. From scratch, here’s how I quickly got my Ruby web development environment into ship-shape form The Thoughtbot Way.
Many of these instructions are specific to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Some of them are opinionated (Vim over Textmate). Pick-and-choose what you need but this is everything that I use happily day-to-day right now.
I chose the quickest,...
Internbot Chronicles #2
The past few weeks have been quite a lot of fun here in Boston. I gave a little talk on Git to some our training students, attended some fun Boston.rb events, hacked on some of Thoughtbot’s open source projects, and tested a lot. Yeah, a lot. I think I’ve spent more time writing actual test code than real code in the past 2-3 weeks.
When testing first becomes a mode of development rather...
2 tags
Tuning the Toad
As we wrote just over two weeks ago, Hoptoad was having a hard time keeping up performance when certain websites were submitting thousands of errors at the same time.
Fixing this became out highest priority and, as I promised then, we will outline the changes we made that have helped us to be able to weather the error storm.
Delayed Counter Cache Updating
The biggest problem we were...
5 tags
Testing Rake's Integration
So now you’re integration testing, because that’s what cool kids are doing these days. This tests the joints of your app, making sure that the model code is being called from the controller code which is being invoked by the user.
A good integration test, as we all know, is from the user’s perspective: “I click this”, “I fill in that”, etc.
But what of...
Internbot Chronicles I
Hey everyone, I’m Nick Quaranto, the new intern at Thoughtbot. You may know me from here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Luckily my university has a co-op education program, so I get to both work at an awesome place and learn even more about Ruby on Rails. I’m working out of the Boston office until the end of the summer, and hopefully I’ll post a new chapter of the Chronicles every week or...
1 tag
Hoptoad Status Update
Hi Everyone,
Some of you may have noticed that over the past two weeks Hoptoad has had a number of, sometimes brief, occurrences of downtime. We sincerely apologize for any trouble this may have caused you, and we’re working on putting a series of fixes in place to make sure it doesn’t continue to happen.
Each of these occurrences except one (more on that below) was caused by a Hoptoad...
The Contest Now: Redux
Last week we announced a contest which people could enter by following @thoughtbot on twitter. A couple hundred of you listened, and entered to win some excellent prizes.
Mr Blair Cummins was so inspired by our contest, that he launched One Million Tweets – which will give 10% of the profit it yields him to The Bridges Foundation. Dutch historians were able to use the contest to confirm...
3 tags
From the journal of Atticus Mendelschmidt III
The Hoptoad frog is named Atticus Mendelschmidt III. He’s had a busy week.
Hot on the heels of the big Lighthouse integration announcement, Atticus wants you to know what else he’s been up to.
Codebase
Codebase is a software project management application with full git hosting & integration. Key features include a complete ticketing interface, milestones, wiki, time tracking in...
2 tags
VTM Boston Interview Video
When we were at the VOICES THAT MATTER Professional Ruby Conference in November, we sat down and did a two-part interview for use in promotional materials for next year’s conference, and for our own amusement. It took a while for us to get our hands on this, but here’s the second of the interviews from that day.
The video features Dan Croak (Developer), Chad Pytel (CEO), Matt Jankowski (COO)...
3 tags
How we accidentally redesigned a product in a week
Our simple CMS for web designers, Widgetfinger, recently had a UI design interface overhaul. The workflow and content listed on most pages is effectively the same, but the aesthetic and general layout have been modernized quite a bit.
Before and after of users page:
The editor
This redesign process began with overhauling the editor. The editor is an important part of the...
7 tags
Step right up, win a $1,295 prize
Here at thoughtbot, we love a good contest.
It’s been too long since the last one, so here we go again. Now since we all kind of know each other, I’m sure we’ll all feel comfortable within the confines of the honor system.
Follow @thoughtbot
That’s it. All followers of the @thoughtbot Twitter account will be eligible to win a prize next week. We’ll pick a random winner for the...
Shoulda 2.10: time for a little love for...
Shoulda’s ActiveRecord macros received some well-deserved attention in 2.9.0,
but what’s Shoulda without a little extra sugar for your controller tests?
RSpec ActionController matchers
Shoulda’s much-loved ActiveRecord macros have been available to RSpec users for
a little while now, but RSpec controller specs have had little love from
Shoulda so far. Shoulda 2.10 ends this streak of...
3 tags
Hoptoad and Lighthouse Integration
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of one of the most requested new features for paid Hoptoad accounts, and one we’ve been really looking forward to ourselves since we rolled our paid accounts for Hoptoad in December—Integration with Lighthouse.
This new feature allows you to seamlessly associate errors in Hoptoad with an existing ticket in your Lighthouse project, or to create a new...