Humans Present: Refactoring

In the latest Humans Present, I sit down with Joe Ferris, our CTO, and we refactor real code from Trajectory.

This hour and ten minute interview and screencast shows:

• What is refactoring and what you need to do it
• Pros and cons of different refactoring techniques
• Removing duplication
• Extracting code to classes and modules

The changes in this video were merged into master and deployed to production the week after filming.

You can purchase this video for $15 or buy it for your entire company for $50. Check it out now. Click through for a preview.

We hope you like it.

Design evolution - from weak to solid

As a designer, it’s possible to nail a design on the first try, but typically, there is an evolutionary process involved. In the case of a recent redesign of Folkstory.us, the process went longer than intended, but the initial mockup and final mockup bear enough resemblances to make for an interesting animated journey. The first mockup failed to knock any socks off whatsoever; however, as time progressed we came to have a solid and successful design. Watch below or click through to the Vimeo HD version to see the crisp details.


Folkstory Revisions from Kevin Burg on Vimeo.

Conference videos

Couldn’t make it to Colorado or Scotland?

There is full video available for a bunch of presentations from last week’s Mountain West ruby conf, including video of thoughtbot’s own Tammer Saleh, delivering his BDD with Shoulda talk (and sporting a handsome thoughtbot T).

Tammer delivered a similar presentation this weekend at Scotland on rails in Edinburgh.

Next scheduled stop is GoRuCo in NYC – Tammer, Joe and Chad will be in attendance.

After that, there will be a strong-but-unofficial thoughtbot presence at ROFLCon at the end of this month in Cambridge, MA. If you’ll be at ROFLCon and want to meet up before or after the discussion of ridiculous internet hijinx, we’ll be around!

And getting back on track is railsconf in beautiful Portland Oregon, where Chad Pytel will present his “Advanced Active Record Techniques: Best Practice Refactoring” talk at 1:50 on Sunday. Hey look, the full schedule.