Matt Wynne taking it one tea at a time
I just got around to watching Avi Bryant’s talk on MagLev, a new Ruby VM built on top of GemStone’s Smalltalk VM. http://www.vimeo.com/1147409 Presumably this is the kind of thing Smalltalkers have been able to do for decades, but to me the prospect of having this kind of freedom on a Ruby platform is very …
Continue reading “MagLev: Death of the Relational Database?”
This evening I facilitated our first coding dojo at work. I’d spent some time over the holidays putting together a progression of Cucumber acceptance test cases to build up the solution, and had solved the problem once myself. I used the minesweeper kata from http://codingdojo.org/ which was a really nice easy problem for our first …
I recently came across this blog post from the venerable Chris Wanstrath (of github / err the blog fame) which took me somewhat aback. Chris suggests that using class << self to contain class methods (C# / Java programmers read ‘static methods’) is a harmful habit that should be discouraged. I dislike class methods generally: …
A common sloppy mistake I see programmers making is to forget to declare a method as private when it’s only being used inside a class. This seems to happen more in Ruby, or maybe it just bothers me more because we don’t have interfaces. Rails ActiveRecord validation callbacks are a classic example where people often …
Continue reading “Your Private Methods are None of my Business”
A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing …
One thing that isn’t documented very well for RSpec is how to test your routes. I came across an old post on the rspec mailing list which described a great way to do this: describe TasksController “routing” do it “should route POST request for /tasks to the ‘create’ action” do params_from(:post, “/tasks”).should == {:controller =>; …
Continue reading “Behaviour-Driving Routes in Rails with RSpec”
This is the first in what I hope to be a series of little posts about the little flashes of ‘culture shock’ that I experience as I start to move from C# to Ruby as my day-to-day programming language. Here we’re going to look at the subtle yet significant difference in how method access modifiers …
Continue reading “C# => Ruby Culture Shock #1: ‘Private’ Methods Ain’t So Private”
One of the things that’s always irritated my about rails’ ActiveRecord framework is the way that the domain model lives in the database.Don’t get me wrong: it’s very clever, and a great showcase for ruby’s metaprogramming features, which will blow average C# / Java mind the mind when they first see it. In rails, you …