June 14, 2010, Practice makes less imperfect
Still catching up on links. The PeepOpen review has morphed into a larger IDE/TextMate piece, hoping to finish that today.
Book Status
Still working on the renovated Style chapter, which will probably combine the chapters that are in the current Table of Contents as “Testing Style and Structure”, “Fix Slow Tests”, “Rcov”, and “Help! My Test Is Failing”. The chapter on Legacy testing will remain a separate chapter – I get asked about how to test legacy projects all the time.
What happens at that point kind of depends where we are on page count – there are two chapters left that are basically unwritten (Selenium, performance testing), and two chapters that are written but need to be brought up to date (Shoulda, RSpec). Probably more information on this line later this week.
Today In Links
Liked this article from Naresh Jain about deliberately practicing TDD on sample problems to get better. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but Project Euler is a great source of sample problems if you are mathematically inclined.
I suppose it was inevitable that somebody would write about Steve Jobs’ presentation style in the wake of the network issues during the iPhone keynote last week. Still, good advice, even if they handwave over the most useful helpful bit – “an adoring crowd”.
Yehuda posted a short gist about implementing the “acts_as” pattern more simply then is usually done.
Thoughtbot posted a list of the Rails 3 compatibility status of all their open projects. Yay! Most relevant for my immediate purposes, Shoulda has a new release with Rails 3 support and “some dramatic changes”. Though I couldn’t quite see from the history what they meant. More details coming.
In other Rails 3 news, Jhimy Villar has a workaround for a Rails 3 issue affecting Authlogic. I’m seriously considering moving the Rails Test Prescription examples to Devise on the grounds that a) it’s already Rails 3 compatible, b) it seems to have fewer setup steps and c) it seems to stay out of the way a bit more, which is a big plus for my purpose.
Did not mention this last week, but RubyConf X will be Nov 11 - 13 in New Orleans. Never made it to a RubyConf.
Zed Shaw has announced the Mongrel2 project, which is a complete redesign of Mongrel. Not much there yet, but watch this space.
Finally
In an interview with Think Geek (via GeekDad), Jonathan Coulton says that the new album he’s been teasing for a bit will be produced by John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants. That should be fun.