Jake Scruggs

I spent the week doing an iteration zero for new project. The idea behind iteration zero is to get the development environment as automated as possible so developers can spend their time coding when the real development begins. So here's what we did: 1. Set up new git repository We use GitHub so that only took a few minutes. 2. Make new Rails app Again, just a few minutes 3. Set up geminstaller and basic gems (HAML etc.) Geminstaller installs gems needed by the project and makes sure they are there before starting the app. This functionality has been pulled into modern versions of Rails now, but I've found it a little wonky and I'm working with a former Pivotal Labs guy who just loves the Pivotal stuff (don't even get him started on Tracker vs Mingle ). 4. Set up developer tests. We looked into Shoulda , but ultimately went with RSpec (although we may use the Shoulda macros to test ActiveRecord) because most of the criticisms of RSpec are th...

Finished the first day of Rails Conf and here are my impressions: DHH's keynote: Lets celebrate what we have. Blah blah blah. Rails has come a long way. Yadda yadda yadda. Here's a sneak preview of what ActiveResource is going to be like in Rails 2.0. Ooooh, Aaaah. Actually the ActiveResource stuff was pretty cool. With a little bit of setup you can have one controller method serve up xml and text and html and all sorts of stuff. All RESTful style of course. And the debugger will be back (broken when someone fixed a bug in Ruby 1.85) and it will be a real debugger. When will 2.0 be out? He didn't say. Go use edge if you dare. Bob Martin's Clean Code Presentation: On the one hand, this is a lot of stuff I've heard before (I hung around Object Mentor at the start of my career), but Uncle Bob is such a good speaker he got me all fired up again about TDD, Red Green Refactor, and incremental steps. There was this point where a slide was clearly missing from th...