If you've ever browsed the source code of this blog, you might
have noticed a directory called lib/active_copy. Opening up that
directory is somewhat interesting, as you'll be able to see exactly how
I take Markdown files with YAML front matter and render them through
ActionView. But unfortunately, unless you fork this repo and hack it to
bits, you were unable to use ActiveCopy in your own Rails projects.
At eLocal, we use the lovely Pivotal Tracker to track our
work progress. It has a really great interface for viewing stories, and
some additional features like tasks, rich text comments, and the ability
to "predict" future iterations by using the velocity and "points" system
(which is totally arbitrary). Another great feature is the story states,
which are also arbitrary, but we use them for very specific
purposes...for example, Delivered means the story has been placed on
the stage server and is ready for testing, while Finished just means
that I've pushed the code to master branch and it can be deployed at
any time.
There has been a lot of hate towards scopes recently. I'm here
to tell you that scopes aren't all bad, and they can be used to create
some astonishingly elegant model definitions.
install bundler-1.3 before installing Ruby 2.0!
That should downgrade RubyGems to a point that you can just do a
gem install bundler to obtain 1.3. Once you begin installing gems
with 1.3, everything in Ruby 2.0 will work out again.
So after posting my article on how to use assertions in rspec, I
was involved in a discussion with @cheapRoc over the discovery
that indeed assertions do work within the context of RSpec. To my
surprise, it seemed @seattlerb was following at least one of us
and overheard our conversation, mistaking my quite hyperbolic statement
for a diss on Minitest.
In the Ruby programming language, there exists two characters you are
only permitted to use when naming a method: ? and !. These
special permissions are designed to allow you to establish a certain
level of convention in your method naming, for example, a method ending
in "?" in Ruby is mosty likely always going to return a Boolean response
of true or false. Not only is this convention not questioned much, but
there seems to be very little sensible use out of making a "?" method
not return a boolean response.
At eLocal, we use "!" as a generalized YOLO convention. It means we're
about to execute some actions which may fail, or are connecting to an
outside resource (such as an API or our mothership site) In either case,
the "!" dictates that our app's control flow should stop.
So it's a well-known Rubyism that you can actually circumvent private and
protected restrictions on instance methods if you simply use the send()
method to access them. I wanted to see if it was possible to rewrite
send() on a particular class to throw an exception if the method attempting
to be accessed was a private method on the class.
Ruby is all about simplicity. Make simple things simple, right? So how come we have to deal with all
this complexity when we run Ruby? This is how I made my life slightly easier and got some really
sweet benefits as a result.
It's certainly been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy with gigs and
vacation, so there's been little time to blog. I have been working on
stuff...including the foundation of a record label (which I'll talk about
in a future post) and maintaining the Wonder Bars' official website.
So here we go, another new layout and another re-hash of this blog's content. I threw away the last two iterations (still have the data, though) of this blog, because I was unsatisfied with the poor content on it. So let's start again.