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Boston guide for RubyistsNovember 16

The Voices that Matter Professional Ruby Conference is this upcoming week in Boston. I’m excited to share our fair city with all of those attending. To make your stay more pleasant, I’ve assembled a little guide.

It is meant explicitly for Rubyists visiting town this week, November 2008. If anyone has other Boston tips, please add them to the comments.

Getting around

The T

The subway system is called “the T”, and has colored lines. The Green Line from Kenmore to Haymarket is the section of the subway system that you most care about for the part of Boston the conference is being held. If you want to go down to MIT, Central Square, or Harvard Square in Cambridge, take the #1 bus from Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue.

The Sheraton and the Prudential

The conference is at the Sheraton Boston (Google Map), which is attached to the Prudential. The Prudential building is the second-tallest in Boston and has a large, upscale mall that connects Huntington Avenue and Boylston Street, two main thoroughfares in Boston. It has a Starbucks, bunch of clothing stores, a Barnes & Noble, and a few chain restaurants (try the clam chowder at Leg

A critical look at the current state of Ruby testingNovember 7

I’ve been feeling lately that there is a splintering in the Ruby community over testing tools. RSpec is very popular. Shoulda, too. context, matchy, bacon & test/spec all have their fans.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with experiments. Diversity is a virtue. We all learn from one another.

However, standards also have their place. Testing is in the DNA of the Ruby community. Why should I have to ask questions on a mailing list of unknown helpfulness when I can find all my answers in the Ruby Standard Library?

There’s a simple fact that no one seems to be talking about: all of these testing tools are solutions to non-existant problems.

Let’s take a critical look at the current state of Ruby testing.

Why context blocks are bad

They look like this in Shoulda: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 context "a GET to #index" do setup do 2.times { Factory(:user) } get :index end should_respond_with :success should_assign_to :users, :equals => "User.ordered" end

This means:

Two GETs. The second one is unnecessary.
Two failure messages if something goes wrong.

On the flight to RubyConf 2008November 5

This is a bit last minute, but most of Thoughtbot (Jason Morrison, Joe Ferris, Mike Burns, Chad Pytel, Matt Jankowsi and myself) are on a flight to Orlando, Florida for RubyConf 2008. If you’ve got questions about Paperclip, Factory Girl, Shoulda or any of our other projects – or if you just want to get some drinks with some fairly personable individuals, then by all means: make your presence known!

Also, I’ll be presenting on Friday at 11:50 on “Coding For Failure: All you need to know for building rock solid applications (in 45 minutes)”. I guarantee that it will have been the best presentation you’ll have seen on Friday at 11:15am.

Design evolution - from weak to solidOctober 31

As a designer, it's possible to nail a design on the first try, but typically, there is an evolutionary process involved. In the case of a recent redesign of Folkstory.us, the process went longer than intended, but the initial mockup and final mockup bear enough resemblances to make for an interesting animated journey. The first mockup failed to knock any socks off whatsoever; however, as time progressed we came to have a solid and successful design. Watch below or click through to the Vimeo HD version to see the crisp details.

<object height="383" width="681"> <param /> <param /> <param /> <embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1913025&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1" height="383" width="681"></embed></object>
Folkstory Revisions from Kevin Burg on Vimeo.

We've turned our subversion server offOctober 28

As we announced quite a while ago we moved all of our plugins to github. Since then, we’ve moved all of our client work (where we provide the source code repo) to github as well.

We had kept our subversion server online, with nothing being updated on it (all updates were in git), but earlier today we shut it down completely. If, for some reason, you were still using the subversion instance of one of our plugins, you’ll want to get it from git now (you would have been using an outdated one anyway).

You can see all of the plugins on the thoughtbot github page, but here are some of the most popular.

While we’re on the subject of git and github, I’d like to mention that paperclip is the 18th most watched project on github, while paperclip and s