Girl!
I play around with Ruby on Rails, and what do I do? Build one webapp to keep track of what’s in my fridge, and another webapp to keep track of what’s in my closet. I’m going to do it in _pink_, too… ;)...
View ArticleRoR: “What’s in My Fridge” now has a shopping list
I know, I know, it’s silly, but it’s also so much fun programming little toys like this! I’m also sketching out a life tracker that does something like Erik Benson’s Morale-o-Meter. On Technorati:...
View ArticleSetting up Ruby on Rails on a Redhat Enterprise Linux Rackspace Cloud Server
1. Compile Ruby from source. First, install all the libraries you’ll need to compile Ruby. yum install gcc zlib libxml2-devel yum install gcc yum install zlib yum install zlib-devel yum install openssl...
View ArticleCucumber, Capybara, and the joys of integration testing in Rails
Development is so much more fun with test cases. They give you a big target to aim for, and it feels fantastic when you write the code to make them pass. Tests also avoid or shorten those late-night...
View ArticleRails: Exporting data from specific tables into fixtures
Rails is pretty darn amazing. There are plenty of gems (Ruby packages) that provide additional functionality. They’re like Drupal modules, except with more customizability (not just hooks) and fewer...
View ArticleRails: Paperclip needs attributes defined by attr_accessible, not just...
I wanted to add uploaded files to the survey response model defined by the Surveyor gem. I’d gotten most of the changes right, and the filenames were showing up in the model, but Paperclip wasn’t...
View ArticleRails: Preserving test data
I’m using Cucumber for testing my Rails project. The standard practice for automated testing in Rails is to make each test case completely self-contained and wipe out the test data after running the...
View ArticleNegative optimization
Checking on one of my projects (a Ruby on Rails survey site), I realized that it was running painfully slowly, taking 30 seconds to render a page. The first thing I checked was memory. I was on a 256MB...
View ArticleContext-switching and a four-project day
Context-switching among multiple projects can be tough. I’m currently: working full-time on one project (a Drupal 6 non-profit website) consulting on another (helping an educational institution with...
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Tracking and organizing my clothes: substituting mathematics for fashion sense
Inspired by my sister’s photo-assisted organization of her shoes, I decided to tackle my wardrobe. Taking an inventory would make it easier to simplify, replace, or supplement my clothes. Analyzing...
View ArticleRuby on Rails: Extending ActiveRecord::Base to define your own ActiveRecord...
One of the things I really like about Rails is the ability to add to existing classes so that your code can be cleaner. For example, in the app we’re working on, I need to be able to display a list of...
View ArticleRails experiences: Building an interactive tutorial
One of the risks for this Rails project that I’m working on is that new users won’t have enough ramp-up time before we finish the project. We’re planning to wrap up in December, which is the end-users’...
View ArticleGeek tidbits: Postfix configuration for development and testing
From November: We got the mail information for our Rails site, so I reconfigured the mail server. We’re doing a lot of development, and testing mail is much easier when you can send example mail...
View ArticleRails experiences: Things I learned from project O
Rails is awesome. We built a workflow/reporting system for ~120 users using Rails 3. My part of the project came to about 468 hours, or roughly 60 workdays (~ 3 months), and I worked with another...
View ArticleMore Rails twiddling
My “What’s in My Fridge” app is now a little bit smarter. It can keep track of what’s still in my fridge, what I’ve used, and what I’ve thrown away. I wonder if this will let me come up with statistics...
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Back to the joys of coverage testing: Vagrant, Guard, Spork, RSpec, Simplecov
Tests are important because programmers are human. I know that I’m going to forget, make mistakes, and change things that I didn’t mean to change. Testing lets me improve my chances of at least...
View ArticleUpgrading from Rails 3 to Rails 4; thank goodness for Emacs and rspec
I spent some time working on upgrading Quantified Awesome from Rails 3 to Rails 4. I was so glad that I had invested the time into writing enough RSpec and Cucumber tests to cover all the code, since...
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