July 2009
14 posts
The New Failwhale: Twitter Homepage
What Happened
I’m sure we’re all familiar with Twitter, but if you’re not, their new homepage won’t help you out very much. I’ve been excited about this since I heard about it some weeks ago. On Tuesday, the release of this design only left me wanting more and I definitely expected something much different .
What Most People Think
I’ve been asking around for...
2 tags
Mystery Guest
The xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code book has an ASTOUNDING amount of testing knowledge. The patterns are also at xunitpatterns.com.
Here’s an example.
You’re having trouble understanding the behavior a test is verifying.
This testing anti-pattern is called Obscure Test.
Maybe the most common cause of for Obscure Test is the Mystery Guest.
Mystery Guest
The...
3 tags
Announcing Developer Day, Boston
We’ve been working with the great folks at Viget Labs and Relevance to bring Developer Day to Boston, and we’re happy to announce that the event will be held at Microsoft NERD on August 15th, 2009 and registration is now open.
For the uninitiated, Developer Day is:
one day only
very cheap
incredibly useful
platform agnostic
technology-centric
Developer Day was born out of...
5 tags
enforcer and report_card
Over the past few weeks I’ve been hard at work on some internal tools here at thoughtbot, and it’s due time that we brought them out for the community to enjoy as well. Without further ado…
enforcer
Since we’ve been hiring lately, we’ve had to set up new people with all of our projects on GitHub. Now that we’ve got 30+ repositories, this was starting to be a pain. Now, with enforcer,...
3 tags
Make your test suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST!
Are your test suites slow? Do you continually refactor your test suites so can get your TATFT on, but still have slow, slow tests? Do you isolate your tests from the database where possible to reduce disk I/O but find yourself mocked by the long runtime of CPU-bound suites?
Maybe it’s time for you to install… PARALLEL SPECS! Originally written by Michael Grosser to speed up RSpec suites,...
6 tags
Open source slides
In August, our training program hits the road at Lone Star Ruby Conf in Austin, TX. Registration for our September Ruby on Rails training is also now open. It marks our one-year anniversary of running Ruby on Rails training classes!
We’ve learned as much as our students. I’d like to focus on one area: slides.
Problems with slides
The format of our class is workshop-oriented, with...
5 tags
Search by quacking like ActiveRecord
The story we’re trying to implement here is: as a user I want to search and filter houses so I can narrow my list of results.
To make this form and controller easier to handle we can use #form_for and pretend that the search is an ActiveRecord object. This allows the form to show fields that have been filled in or any errors on the search using existing Rails infrastructure.
The trick...
The Journey to Ruby 1.9
Thanks to some late-night hacking at Boston.rb and plenty of awesome contributors, our gems are now Ruby 1.9 compatible. If you’re wondering what’s different in the newest version of Ruby, check out this great list from Eigenclass.org. Here’s some tips and tricks for those who want to upgrade their own Ruby install and have their gems to be compatible.
Installation
It’s dead easy to run Ruby...
3 tags
A few Hoptoad UI adjustments
Since we launched the Hoptoad redesign we’ve been discussing ways to improve usability which has lead to a few changes as well as some new features. Below is an overview of some of these changes:
Error Index
1. Rails environment indicator: in order to save space we trimmed the environment to the first character which will expand when you hover over it. Additionally we added the environment...
2 tags
Build Guild Philly
I’ve just started a Philadelphia local chapter of The Build Guild, which is a monthly event (Occurs the 3rd Tuesday of every month in Philly) where folks in the web industry—designers, coders, project managers, hobbyists, etc.—can get together to talk web, debate industry topics, share ideas, make professional connections, land gigs, and discuss the real reasons why mustaches need to make a...
4 tags
How to make really nice buttons
Introduction
Creating buttons is something every web designer deals with, usually on a very regular basis. It can be one of those tasks that becomes tedious and repetitive but with a few tricks you can make pleasing looking buttons that also give the visitor useful feedback and navigational consistency. In this article I’ll be talking about buttons with 3 states – normal, hover, and pressed...
8 tags
sign up, sign in, sign out
What is your Ubiquitous Language for authentication?
Common language includes “logging in”, “registering”, “joining up”, “creating an account”, “signing up”, & “signing out”.
Do you interchange these words in your UI? How about in your application code? Tests? Does your whole team use the same language across all layers of the software?
When writing a library like Clearance, I feel...
Hoptoad: same great taste, all new design
It’s been almost a year since we first launched the Toad, so we thought it was time to clean things up a bit. Without further ado, we’d like to announce the newly redesigned Hoptoad!
The look and feel of the entire application has been revamped to provide a more enjoyable experience. We started with a fresh stylesheet, and then unified the form and button styles between our other...
4 tags
When I Enter the Office, the Imperial March Plays
A long time ago in an office far, far away… robot wars! I mean, budget surplus! We had a bit extra in the budget a while back and so we did what any responsible business owners would have done: ask the employees what they wanted us to spend it on. Here’s the list we got back:
A fully glass floor so I can watch the people below me
Currency valid only on Dean Kamen’s personal island
A...