I'm very happy to say that I started my new job as a Senior Engineer at Intridea today! I look forward to working with some of the leading experts in the Ruby development community and hope to grow my skills as a developer along the way.
Continue Reading…I've been doing a lot of Cucumber testing lately and have really been liking it, but there is one thing that is hard with Cucumber... debugging errors. That is until I found out about the save_and_open_page method that webrat provides for opening a browser to the page the cuke puked on from Bodaniel Jeanes over on his blog.
The only problem was that the page didn't look very nice. I could have left it (it was working after all) but then I ran across an init script for cuke in a gist from Duff that allowed for the rewriting of the paths to the local image, JavaScript and CSS files so they at least could be referenced properly. While this worked, most of my images were specified as backgrounds in my actual CSS files so if I wanted to be able to see the page as it was intended I would need to find a way to change the paths in the actual CSS files as well.
Continue Reading…One of the things that bugged me about Rails when they made the move from only having has_and_belongs_to_many (HABTM) to also including the has_many_through (HM:T) join model option (which is now the preferred way to go), was that you needed to write your own code in the model to get the associations to work properly. With the old HABTM implementation this was handled for you.
Continue Reading…I recently moved a long running request in my application to delayed job (the collectiveidea fork) and it went really well. However, after some time the delayed job process died and my users couldn't use an essential part of the application. I knew it was time for a process monitor. I probably should have put one in to begin with, but I was new to delayed job (really to background processing in general) and the though hadn't crossed my mind.
Continue Reading…Recently I've been trying to get my new unibody macbook pro connecting to SQL Server 2005 with FreeTDS. I was following the great guide from the Ken Collins the author of the rails-sqlserver activerecord adapter that I use but no matter what configuration settings I edited I couldn't get my machine to connect to the SQL Server.
Continue Reading…Now I’m not saying that I only want to be a tester of web applications. After all, creating them is what I enjoy the most. However, I believe that to be a professional coder, you need to test your applications. Now I’m not talking about that day or two at the end of a project when you run through the application in your browser and hope that nothing breaks. No, I’m talking about real testing. Testing that is done alongside the code, if not before. To me, testing is a tool that I’m integrating into my coding stack that is simply going to become part of how I write an application.
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A friend of mine in the web development community is releasing a book called "Web Design for Developers: A Programmer's Guide to Design Tools and Techniques". I was asked to do a tech review of the book and will be sharing my thoughts as well as some cool info presented in the book in a short series of upcoming blog posts. If you want to grab a beta copy of the book head over to my favorite publisher The Pragmatic Programmers.
My most recent studio project was mixing and producing the latest a cappella album to come out of Eau Claire, WI. Until Proven Guilty is the Innocent Men's 4th studio album and marks a huge leap forward in recording and production quality for the group. Check back for demos of the mastered songs very soon! http://theinnocentmen.com.
