I’m sure you’ve all heard the Rails 3 announcement. When I first found out my initial reaction was “fuck me“. But shortly after I was filled with a feeling of dread and general unease. And I didn’t know why ….
Firstly, a bit of history.
I first tried programming on a Commodore [...]

I’ve recently been updating some old code - partly written by someone else, partly written by myself. At the time, I thought I had written this code really well; looking back on it now, it looks awful. Fair enough, I’ve learnt a lot - I want to look back on old code and [...]

There seems to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about the upcoming VAT change. Especially as it is only a 13 month change and the rate will revert to 17.5% in 2010.
However, it ought to be really simple (although I realise that this may be a bit late for [...]

I’ve written up a new post at the Brightbox blog detailing how we are using RSpec and Cucumber to build acceptance tests for the next generation Brightbox systems.

Last night I gave a talk at Geekup about RSpec and RSpec User Stories.  
 
Telling Stories With RSpec
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ruby rails)

 
Thanks to Ashley Moran for talking it through with me.
UPDATED to use Slideshare to display the slides.

Two (related) thoughts on “The Specification is the Documentation“.
One of the things that I like to do, when developing, is to start with a sketch (you know, with 95g/m2 paper and a 6B pencil) of how the UI will look. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it helps communications with the client [...]

In a former life I used to write “functional specifications”. These were long, dense, hard-to-read documents that detailed what an application (not yet written) was supposed to do. I would spend (literally) weeks typing these things up, the customer would read it, think they understand and I would quote them based upon the document. [...]

I personally can’t stand the Dock on Apple’s Mac OS X. It doesn’t feel right to me, it doesn’t hold enough information nor does it display the information it does have correctly. And I feel like it is stealing screen space from me (and “auto-hide” is just a crappy hack that [...]

Sometimes, it’s worth stating the basics for all to see:

Follow the Model-View-Controller paradigm.  In particular, your views house your user-interface, your models handle the application and your controllers mediate between the two.  Controllers do not contain rules, conditionals dealing with business conditions, queries looking for objects related to the one in question.  All those things [...]

Normally I wouldn’t talk about Ruby on Rails on this blog. That geek talk is found on the tech blog instead.
But, despite being about Rails, this isn’t a tech post. It’s about a problem that you will face when trying to hire a Rails developer.
Rails has a number of advantages.

It is a framework [...]