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 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.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many Open Source projects have documentation that is sadly lacking. A case in point is GNU Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is one of my favourite languages but a decent Smalltalk implementation that fits with your native window manager is hard to find. The point of GNU Smalltalk is that [...]

My first adventure in source control was many years ago. It was my first proper job and I was the sole developer in a tiny company. To keep the source code safe, it was all stored on a network share, and the file server was backed up at least once a day. [...]

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. [...]

One of the great advantages of using mock objects to test and specify your objects is that you concentrate solely on the thing you are testing.  
If you weren’t using mocks to tests that a controller re-shows the “new” form if given an invalid object, you would do post :create, :model => { … } where [...]

A very interesting article about how DRY you should be in your specs.  
http://lindsaar.net/2008/6/24/tip-24-being-clever-in-specs-is-for-dummies
Personally I agree with everything said.  Readability comes first, even at the expense of efficiency and DRY; “be nice to those who have to maintain the code”.  The really interesting thing though is the example is actually quite DRY - it’s more [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]