Blackfriars Marketing commenting on Bill Gates’ claim that Enterprise Software gets little respect (via the Wall Street Journal).
As someone who has worked on ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ software for most of my career (the difference being one of scale as far as I can see) I wholeheartedly agree. I got sick of being told that [...]

rake db:fixtures:load is probably one of the most useful commands I have used recently.
You see, I was meeting some people about some potential work. They wanted to see an example - preferably related to payment systems. I had some code but unfortunately, the service that is part of had been switched [...]

You know how it is - there are some things that you are just not comfortable without. My phone in my back pocket, my wallet in my front pocket, the key in the front door when I go to bed (just in case there’s a fire and we have to make a hasty exit), [...]

I’m just thinking out loud here - based on stuff I’ve done well in the past. But this is no rigorous scientific method - just a set of notes for me to refer back to.
* Write a couple of paragraphs describing the application. Note down keywords (especially important nouns and verbs) [...]

I remember years ago, when Object-Orientated Programming became fashionable, every single text on it (at least those that I could be bothered to read) repeated the mantra “OO is about inheritance”. Of course, that’s rubbish, but when you’ve been dealing with structs in C or Cobol it’s probably an easy way of thinking of [...]

I love the song “Standing Here” by the Stone Roses (you may notice a Roses-bent to this blog). Not only does it have some of John Squire’s finest noodlings, great lyrics and fantastic work by Mani - it also includes one of my favourite bits of backing vocals in the world. A simple [...]

I’m currently wrestling with a problem. My application has Attendees that either belong to PrivateCourses or Bookings. It uses a polymorphic association for this: has_many :attendees, :as => :attendable.
However, in both cases the UI is pretty much identical. So I figured I could set up routes like so:
map.resources :private_courses [...]

One thing to watch out for, when using Markaby:
link_to_remote ‘whatever’, :url => some_path(@something), :before => do_this, :complete => do_that
will not work.
Instead you need:
link_to_remote ‘whatever’, :url => some_path(@something).to_s, :before => do_this, :complete => do_that
Spot the difference? The :url parameter has a .to_s appended on the end. [...]

One thing has struck me over my recent Rails-beautification tangent.
My fictional resource-routes example:
map.resources_called(:course_templates, :adding => [ GetMethod.called(:build_courses, :on => :members), PostMethod.called(:do_build_courses, :on => :members) ], :nesting => map.resources_called(:course_details) [...]

I have the following models: a “base” class, Event, with two descendants, PublicCourse and PrivateCourse. Although, data-wise, they are pretty similar, behaviour-wise they are quite different. So Single Table Inheritance (STI although that could mean something completely different) is the way to go. (The alternative, of course, is a mix-in - which [...]