August 16, 2010: I Still Like Boring Software Development
Book Status
Beta 6 is out and available for sale here. The major addition is the new Shoulda chapter. It’s also available from Amazon. Note that the ship date for the print book seems to have moved to November.
Next up is the RSpec chapter, which will probably be Beta 7 sometime in the next week to ten days. After that, most likely a new chapter on test performance / performance testing. I also need to figure out what to do with an existing short bit on Autotest that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. After that, we’ll see where we are in time and length.
The Boring Software Manifesto
It was fun to see my old Boring Software Manifesto linked at the bottom of this PragMag article on Software Manifestoes. I should revisit the Boring Manifesto, I think.
Links
If you are like me, then you are paying attention to Rails 3 but haven’t done any significant production projects yet. You may have seen odd references to a snowman. Sam Ruby presents a brief but clear explanation of why Frosty is now a part of Rails URLs.
One of my favorite Mac programs is Scrivener, and I wish that my writing projects lent themselves to using it more often. In this great post, Scrivener developer Keith Blount explains all the features that won’t be in Scrivener 2.0. One feature that will, though, is Dropbox integration, so that a Scrivener project can be worked remotely via, say, Droptext on an iPad.
Chronic is one of my favorite Ruby gems – it leads to a great client demo when you type “a week from next tuesday” into a calendar text box. Aaron Sumner has an overview of using Chronic and Chronic Duration for date and time parsing.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz is leaving Engine Yard after four years, and takes a blog-posts worth of time to reminsce.
Finally, Greg Moreno has been updating a Rails project to Rails 3, and documenting the process. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.