Jake Scruggs

At work we have to go through a proxy to get to the outside world. So every time I take my laptop home I need to switch the proxy setting on my browser. Lame. Surely there is some sort of Firefox plugin to help me with this tedious task. And there is. But Foxyproxy isn't it. It's crazy heavyweight and unpredictable. The heavyweight part is that you can define different proxy settings and each of those settings can have white and black lists (with wildcard or regex matching) that decide whether or not to use a proxy. Or you can mix and match proxies for different sites. All that I could live with, but I just spent a few hours tracking down a bug that didn't exist because of Foxyproxy's weirdness. The feature I was working on involved calling out to an outside system. But the browser just spun and spun when I tried it. After a LOT of time spent talking to people about the right configuration for this 3rd party system I guessed that just possibly this was a prox...

My latest story card is all about getting our app to send email so I’ve had to delve into ActionMailer. It’s a cool way to send emails without tons of code but there are some things that are a little bit wacky. Let us say that you’ve got a cookie website and you want people to be able to send emails of their favorite recipes to each other. “My that’s a handsome cookie” they might say and “Oh look, an email button that lets me send this recipe to a friend. This site has met my needs exactly.” In order to get such a thing to happen you would create a RecipeMailer model that extended ActionMailer kinda like this: class RecipeMailer < ActionMailer::Base def recipe_email(email_params) @from = email_params[:from] @recipients = email_params[:recipients] @subject = email_params[:subject] @sent_on = email_params[:sent_on] @body[:recipe] = email_params[:recipe] end end In your controller you’d call: RecipeMailer.deliver_recipe_email(email_params) And some good old method_missin...

We’re using an open source java app to help with searching on my current project and when I start it up (through cygwin – must… stop… developing… in… windows…) it throws up a bunch of stack traces. The first time I saw this I thought “holy crap, I must have configured it wrong.” And I was right. But then I configured it correctly and I was still getting a few stack traces on startup. I spent an hour or so trying to fix the problem before I remembered that lots of times a Java app will thow some errors at ya just for fun and I started up the rails app, navigated to the search, and it worked fine. Nice. So I just learned to ignore those stack traces. Can you see where this is going? Yep, later the search stopped working in a spectacular way that took down the whole app. Except I wasn’t sure it was the search breaking it. And I lost a bunch of time because I was ignoring the errors that were telling me something was wrong. They were different errors than the usual...

At my current gig I develop on Windows while the rest of the team is working on Linux (but not for long, I just got PartitionMagic and I’m going to dual-boot). This has caused several problems and one of the most vexing is that the Linux dudes can check in fixtures that blow up on my Windows box. Every time it happens I take a look at the offending fixture and it isn’t putting something into a column that has been declared ‘not null.’ So I fix it by adding in some data, but why the hell isn’t it blowing up on their machines (or cruise control, which is on a Linux box)? My colleague Ricky Lui figured it out today. Allow me to quote from his email: On our Linux machines, MySQL is installed with no default sql_mode. That means if there's a certain column that's supposedly NOT NULL, your unit tests can still pass even without setting that column (e.g. through test fixtures). For MySQL installation on Windows, the default sql_mode is set, so that same unit test that pass...

I’ve got some bad new for ya. I know you’ve been reading this blog picturing me as some handsome muscled young stud -- but I am not. I’m fat and 35 and all muscle has left since I stopped working out about 5 years ago. What happened? Who cares – what I wanna talk about today is how every waiter is trying to kill me. They are! As a traveling consultant I tend to eat out 3 meals a day while I’m on the road. And in order to lose some weight I thought I’d just stop getting side dishes. Hamburger – no fries. Pasta – no garlic bread. Whatever it comes with -- I don’t want it. This is very hard for waitstaff. Here’s a conversation I’ve had about a thousand times: Me - “I’ll have the French dip, but I don’t want any sides” Waiter - (confused pause) Waiter – “You don’t want… Would you like to substitute something else for the fries?” Me – “Nope. Just the French dip is fine.” Waiter – (weirded-out pause) “Um… Okay.” 15 minutes later ...

Oh sure everybody says you should throw out the prototype after you make it, but look at all that yummy code just waiting to be used. Sure you wrote it fast and without tests – but it took a lot of work and it would be silly not to just use it as the base of your real project. Brush it off, clean it up a little, and it’ll be fine. Don’t do it. First of all it’s not fine. Code written without the threat of production tends not to be good. But let’s pretend you did write some nice code (you didn’t but this is pretend time). Now you’ve got huge chunks of untested code floating around that looks like it does stuff but actually is just left over from the prototype. Joe dev comes along and tries to write some functionality and he comes across a bunch of prototype code. It’s really confusing. It’s doing all this stuff. Stuff that doesn’t seem to work like he thought the app was supposed to work… Huh. “Oh well, I guess that’s how they want it done so I better foll...

Awhile back I was bored of the suburbs and being a teacher (high school physics for 7 years – no foolin’) so I decided to become an actor. I didn’t quit my job, but I did use my summer vacation to take 3 acting classes at once. It was a crazy good time and I completely recommend it to anyone looking for a change of pace and/or the opportunity to meet lots of pretty girls. Anyway, one of my classes was Improvisation which should really be called game playing for adults. Remember cops and robbers? Well yeah, it was like that. Teacher would get some volunteers and come up with some wacky situation and the 2 or more actors would just play out the scene. You’re a salesman on his way to a big sales call who sits next to a weird guy on the bus. And you, you’re a crazy person who thinks this bus is a submarine. Go. Somewhat scary, but lots of fun. But like cops and robbers the game could stall if people didn’t play fair. “I shot you. No you didn’t” and so on. The num...

So the project I’m working on has multiple databases – which is, in Rails opinion, kinda weird. Lately we’ ve been having some issues where one developer will check in a migration that creates a new database and updates the database.example file. Everyone else does an update, tries to run their migrations, and gets an error saying that you can’t overwrite Object:: InstanceMethods . What they need to do is add a few more lines to their database. yml file from the example file, but how would they know that unless they saw the database.example file amongst the stream of files that came down when they updated from source control. We need to get better about telling everyone (an email or a shout out to the room) when these get checked in. Because invariably some dev spends a few minutes scratching their head with this perplexing error. What’s worse is that when I get this error on windows – It’s all over. I update my database file: same error. I drop and re-create all my...

So I ran into this weird problem with RSpec (the unit test (spec) framework for Ruby) and Rcov (a code coverage tool also for Ruby). At some point, usually as your list of specs gets longer, if you run your specs with Rcov they blow up with a seg fault. I’ve seen this happen on OSX, Windows, and now Linux. On my last project we just had to give up running Rcov (which sucked). This time Ricky Lui and Peter Ryan managed to figure out that if they comment out the tests that have an Active Record object mocked out for new, then Rcov is fine. Say you have an object called User and your controller gets a new instance and does a bunch of stuff to it. Well, you want to test (specify) what happens to that object so you do this: specify “something important should happen to User” do mock_user = mock(“mock_user”) User.should_receive(:new).and_return(mock_user) mock_user.should_receive(:some_method).twice.and_return(“whatever”) etc. end But Rcov no like this. So to get ...

So I wrote this website for my dad over the weekend. Mostly to replace this site I wrote about 8-9 years ago when I first learned HTML. Dad’s a sculptor and I thought it would be cool for him to have a web presence. Of course to update the site he has to edit these html templates I gave him, create thumbnails and non-huge regular images of the pictures he’s taken, and then ftp the files to his server. Not so fun for a guy born during the year of Pearl Harbor . So I wanted to create a site where he could easily create piece objects (with all the info), put them in galleries, and re-arrange the front page all through a web interface. Now a little over a year ago I did a similar thing for a friend of mine who sells homemade jewelry as my first Rails project and it took a while. Part of that was learning Ruby and Rails all at once, the other part was that I added some cool search functionality that she totally didn’t need, but mostly it was figuring out how to upload and mana...

You join a new project (and if you’re a consultant like me then this happens a lot) and you start asking a bunch of questions. Where’s the svn repository? What version of Rails are we using? How do I install this other thing upon which our thing depends? And the answers come. But then it’s a few days later and the more sensitive questions come: Why aren’t we pairing much? Why is this meeting scheduled to take most of the day (when it should 45 minutes at most)? How come the dev boxes are so slow? And if the answers you get to those questions are variations on “Um… We can’t do that – talk to me about it later.” then something is busted. You don't know what it is, but you can feel it in the atmosphere. It’s tense. Some things are unspoken and mysterious forces are making sure it stays that way. Every iteration seems like it has too much in it. Its common knowledge that we have way more scheduled for release 1.0 then we can do in the time allowed. If...

As part of the hiring process at ThoughtWorks we do a code review. After a candidate gets through a few gates (a resume’ screen and some phone interviews) the prospect is giving a choice of three code problems to work on. They have 3 days to complete the assignment and turn it in. Then we have 2 developers look over the code (separately) and assign it a score. A lot of these submissions are pretty bad. Java arrays used where an object would provide clarity, cryptic variable names, missing files needed to run the project, and (amazingly) code that just plain don’t work. But last night I graded a submission that was a joy to read. He submitted in Ruby (a good sign, but not a sure thing by any means) and clearly understood the elegance of the language. He did some fun things with aliasing and Ruby’s built in collections methods that made me smile. And they weren’t just showing off either. Sometimes we get solutions that are crazy over designed. Pages and pages of co...

First of all I was sick for 4 days last week so, yes, I missed the first 4 days of my new project. Nice. Now this is an ongoing project (for about a monthish now), so it wasn’t a total tragedy. But I did feel like a mope calling in every day to say that I was indeed still sick. I’m still sick, but it’s at a point where I can manage it with OTC medications. Drugged up and billable I am. W00t. And did I mention it was -9 degrees outside with a wind chill of -20 F this morning? Good lord -- that is a whole lot of cold (Especially as my new commute involves a brisk 30 minute walk across downtown Chicago ). Good times. But what I meant to talk about was RMagick – which is a pain. It’s an image manipulation gem for Ruby that is pretty powerful but totally took down 2 systems I tried to install it on in the last 2 weeks. Back on First Street Live, Clint and I tried to install it on a Mac mini but Mac Ports and Fink started to fight over who was the package management o...