Jake Scruggs

I spent the weekend at Citcon (Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) in Minneapolis. Citcon (which is pronounced Kitcon -- because it sounds cooler) is an open spaces conference which means that there are no scheduled talks. The people who show up propose ideas and then they vote on what they want to see. It sounds like it would never work but it actually works very well. For instance, Toby Tripp proposed a session on testing smells and it got enough votes to get a session but when I showed up there were only 6 people. Which kinda bummed me out until we started talking, then I realized that we had exactly the right 6 people and another 20, 50, or 100 half interested dudes typing away on their computers really wouldn't have added to the talk. As it was the talk was intimate and to the point. We came up with the following smells (a smell is a sign that something might be wrong -- Fowler used this metaphor to great effect in his seminal book " Refactoring ")...

Today, for some reason, I was thinking about a start-up I worked on few years ago and how we could go really fast because (almost) no one used the darn thing. When you're working on a small budget you need to get that code out into the wild as soon as possible so you can figure out if this idea of yours has any legs. So maybe you test a bit less then you would with a big application and you don't pair program that often and workflow is managed through IM and email and you take shortcuts because if you didn't the code would never see the light of day. That's the way it has to be and everyone accepts that. However, there will come a reckoning -- and it's not fun from the owner's point of view. The site's popular -- it's making some money but your development team is slowing down and asking for expensive things. They've brought on a new guy, but in addition to costing more money the team (which has now ballooned to two people!) is going slower for so...

So I had this form in a Rails view that needed some changes so, amongst other things, I changed this: form_tag(:action => 'search') to this: form_tag(:action => 'show', :method => :get) I had noticed that the show and search methods essentially did the same thing (and had the same views) -- which I why I refactored. However, when I made the change I got a 500. I was using restful routes and this form needed to be a get -- which I thought I had indicated. But I had not -- what should have put in the view was this: form_tag({:action => 'show'}, {:method => :get}) There's this idiom in Ruby where we don't put curly braces around hashes if we don't need to, but I've consistently lost a bunch of time to mistakes like the one above. So I'm thinking about explicitly denoting hashes with curly braces in my future Ruby code just to improve intentionality.

What a nice conference! Emphasis on nice. First Joel Adams, chair of Computer science at Calvin College, got up and welcomed us. Calvin College is where GLSEC was held and it looks so shiny and new I wondered if it had just been constructed. I stayed in a room the was about 200 feet from where I gave my talk. Then the mayor of Grand Rapids, George Heartwell, gave us software dudes a nice little welcome speech. He implored us to see downtown Grand Rapids and then talked a lot about jobs and growth. I know Michigan has had hard times, but from the looks of the airport and Calvin College (which is about as scientific a survey as it gets) Grand Rapids must be a city on the grooooow. The opening Keynote was given by Michael Cloran who is the the CEO of Interactions. He started off with a live demo of the "Service Factory." He spoke, through his phone, to a computer and it parsed his voice and answered his questions. It was scary impressive. Typical line from the extended ...

As I am clearly crazy, but hear me out. Say there's a Car object that uses single table inheritance and all the objects that descended from it are routed through the car method in the CarController. The CarController looks like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 class CarController < ApplicationController def car layout = nil @scripts = [] @stylesheets = [] @car = Car .find(params[ :id ]) if @car .is_a?( Toyota ) layout = ' two_column ' @stylesheets << ' two_column_layout.css ' @stylesheets << ' two_column_theme.css ' elsif @car .is_a?( Hyundai ) layout = ' three_column ' @stylesheets << ' three_column_layout.css ' @stylesheets << ' three_column_theme.css ' @stylesheets << ' hyundai_theme.css ' @scripts << ' discount.js ' elsif ...