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Showing posts from July, 2007

I'm Presenting on RSpec in Houston

I've been invited to give a presentation on RSpec at the Houston Area Ruby and Rails User Group on Monday August 6th -- and I'm pretty excited to do it. It'll be a nice opportunity to organize my thoughts and lessons learned after using RSpec on my last two projects. I'll be talking about the why and the how of RSpec (focusing mostly on the how), specifically as it applies to testing Rails apps. Watch this space for the blogization of this presentation.

Caching Dynamically Modified Objects and the Trouble it Causes

So I told you, in a previous post , about how our application has two parts: the live site and the cms. And that we want objects of the same class to behave differently in the two applications (only 'live' status objects should show up on the live site), which is not so hard in Ruby. But a few days later and after some conversations with our architect about how our caching works we realized that we had a huge bug. We use memcached and cache-fu to cache our objects and we share that cache between the cms and the live site for the simple reason that we want an update to the object in cms to blow away the cache for the live site (otherwise the live site would never see the change as it would constantly be referencing the old cached version). But, as you may have already guessed, if the live site gets an object cached from the cms then all sorts of 'draft' stuff will show up on the public site because an object built in the cms will not have the extra special dynamica

Big Weekend for Nerds

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Lots of chatter around ThoughtWorks about the iPhone but, for me, this weekend was all about the Weird Al concert. I got your alpha geek right here, buddy: Great performance -- More costume changes than a Vegas show. And more Star Wars parodies too.