My favorite Ruby Kaigi talk was by Yasuko Ohba (@nay3) of Everyleaf Corporation in Japan. Despite the fact that the talk was in Japanese, with nice code examples on the slides and key translations over IRC, I was able to follow the presentation and learn some tricks. The coding techniques are really quite [...]
We have a new sign for our office. Check it out next time you visit:
For last week’s retrospective, we decided to focus on strategies to improve our performance as pair programmers. We chose the “Force Field Analysis” activity from the Agile Retrospectives book, an activity geared toward gaining insight. I was pleased to hear at the end of the retrospective, one of the newer engineers remark:
“In my [...]
I was excited to participate in the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit last Friday. Elesterama has a nice write-up of the keynote, which was followed by an unconference led by the fabulous Kaliha Hamlin. The unconference format puts the hallway track front and center, allowing for lots of interaction and great conversations. The hot [...]
Yesterday we were deep in the middle of coding using RSpec 2 and Rails 3 and needed to verify that a method made a specific http request. I happily discovered WebMock, which appears to be a next generation FakeWeb. Originally developed by Bartosz Blimke, I was happy to see that Sam Phillips had [...]
Blazing Cloud is seeking companies to join the next session of its innovative internship program. The program targets companies which are developing with Ruby on Rails and related tech. Arguably, this shouldn’t even be called an internship — it is really an on ramp for talented engineers hungry to break into Rails development. [...]
Suppose we wanted to modify a basic Rails application so there was the option of a preview before creating a new record.
What is a good pattern for adding a second button to a form?
There are two options:
One controller action with a flag: nice articles by EyeDeal and Myers Development (from 2008 [...]
Ruby classes will be taught by Liah Hansen and Sarah Allen. Blazing Cloud is offering two classes, both on Sunday afternoons, for six sessions: March 7 – April 18th. (Note: class will not be held April 4th.) Also, note that Sarah is teaching a full week of classes on Ruby and Rails March [...]
Outsourcing has become a familiar pattern in the software industry. As an alternative to high-priced American workers, companies will hire people overseas at a fraction of the hourly wage. I propose an alternate model of “insourcing” — hiring folks close to home who have the smarts and some of the skills but not [...]
I just finished a 3 day mobile training session in Columbus, Ohio. I taught cross-platform mobile development with Rhodes, RhoSync and mobile web UI techniques. I was thrilled to be joined by Brian Moore, who demonstrated how to use mspec with Rhodes (rspec-like testing framework for mobile) and a new debugger that [...]