April 2010
7 posts
1 tag
Pozit.com — A design process retrospective
A designer’s process is a personal approach to solving design problems. This is a walkthrough of my design process for Pozit, a recent project here at thoughtbot.
Sketching - stay loose in the beginning
Sketching can be fun as well as useful — I’ve found that using watercolor is a great way to be in a creative state of mind while being forced to stay loose because of the nature of...
Unit and Functional Tests are as Useful as 100%...
I’m going to try and keep this short: if you’re writing Rails applications and are not writing integration tests, you need to start. Today. At Thoughtbot, we write integration tests with Cucumber, although you could use Steak or any other tool.
Most developers know that achieving 100% C0 code coverage isn’t a worthwhile goal in the grand scheme of things. You can use...
Big Bang
We usually work on apps that take a few weeks or months to launch. However, we’re doing something a little different next week for an awesome Cambridge company: we’ll be starting an application on Monday morning and launching it on Friday.
Something different, but familiar
We love the Rails Rumble, sponsoring the championship belt, competing as multiple teams, and enviously watching...
Cucumber, Webrat, HTTP auth, and your API
When you want to authenticate against an API in your application, and you use the standard Rails integration test methods to call your endpoint, #basic_auth won’t work:
When /^I post to "([^\"]*)" as "(.*)\/(.*)" with the following params:$/ do |path, username, password, table|
basic_auth(username, password)
post_params = table.hashes.first
post path, post_params
end
You’ll...
1 tag
Say 'hello' to our newest team members
We’ve been super busy lately - so we knew the time was ripe to bring a few more people onto the team.
We’re very fortunate to have found three excellent new people to add to the team, two new designers and a developer: Kyle Fiedler, Chad Mazzola, and Harold Giménez.
Adding two designers doubled the size of the design team and really increased our ability to get stuff done there....
1 tag
We're giving away an iPad!
That’s right folks, you heard right, the Shiny Robots design crew here at thoughtbot is giving away a brand spanking new iPad. This is being done in an effort to promote our new project, Landing Pad, a showcase of beautiful iPad app designs.
To find out how to win, see the contest page. Happy Landings everyone!
2 tags
Requiem for the desktop
If you’re reading this, chances are good that you build websites or software for a living. And if you’re reading this today (Friday, April 2, 2010), chances are also good that this is the last day you’ll feel good about doing your job the way you’ve been doing it.
Yes, this is about the iPad.
Even though I haven’t ordered one yet, I have no trouble believing that...