There is much talk these days about building a product for a niche and making a lifestyle business out of it. Much of the online literature about starting up is focused on how to create some fantastic product which will gather millions of visitors and make you a billionaire, and the “new wave”, so to […]

In this article, Adrian Hon, picks up on the idea (originally from Gregory Bateson, I believe) that time pressure creates what Bateson calls false endpoints, that reduce the quality of the final solution. He also proposes that the development process in creative fields should be altered to encourage “play” as a way of generating solutions, […]

You’re a business guy, a manager, or you’re a developer. You work on a startup, or within a large corporation. You’re about to start on your company’s flagship product, or you’ve been asked to take project X forward. Or you could be anywhere in between those extremes. One question should be worrying you as you […]

When building something new, mistakes are unavoidable. To paraphrase the common saying, “if you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough”. There’s another saying which says that the difference between a good carpenter and a bad carpenter is not that the good carpenter doesn’t make any mistakes, but that he’s better at turning […]

With astonishing regularity, articles or posts come out claiming that Rails sucks in some way or another. People complain that Rails isn’t as easy to deploy as PHP, that Rails just didn’t do it for project XYZ. They range from the articulate and well thought out to the frankly inane and stupid (and wrong). Recently, […]

When designing a feedback system to influence change (for instance, a status report to influence the project progress, or an attempt to lose weight or save money) it’s easy to fall into the trap of going for accuracy first. Countless hours can be wasted designing the perfect measure of progress, making sure it’s accurate as […]

People compare programming languages all the time. Often, comparing languages can feel like comparing pieces of string (as in the expression “how long is a piece of string?”). There doesn’t seem to be much common vocabulary to rely on, particularly when explaining things to a non-programmer.
If you talk to computer scientists (the kind who like […]

Here’s a lovely little snippet that shows the reasons why Ruby is such a nice language to work with. It’s to do with matching at least one of a series of items in RSpec.

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How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?
It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number […]

You know that feeling. You’re about to start on a new piece of work. Your gut tells you “this is going to take 2 months”. Your client/boss/friend tells you “no way, that’s just two weeks’ worth!” Truth is, your gut’s probably right. With experience, you become quite good at quickly estimating work. It’s a basic […]

Premature optimisation is an extremely common anti-pattern, and one that’s very difficult to resist. This is probably because of a wide variety of factors, including:

Optimisation is fun! It’s problem-solving at its finest, with the potential for lots of clever tricks
Optimisation can be comparatively easy and short-term: it’s easy to focus on just optimising the piece […]

I am trying to put together a series of articles on “correct” Rails development, for the purpose of helping to get across what I mean to a company that I am working with. I thought I’d post them on my blog because they can be useful for others too.
I see these applying to any size […]

I hang around in the #facebook channel on freenode, and a question that recurs a lot is to do with session keys. Now, those are explained in the Facebook developers wiki, but not particularly well. This is probably why this question pops up a lot.
Here’s the clear, definitive guide to sessions in facebook.

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It’s always very important to write integration tests. Hell, it’s not just very important, it’s critical. Some systems make it easier than others to do so. Rails, for instance, provides many, many hooks and bits of framework to make your apps easily testable. Facebook, on the other hand, is a major pain in the ass.
One […]

Sometimes, while figuring out why something doesn’t work, it’s useful to just quickly get a dump of what methods are being called, e.g. on a controller. Yes, debuggers can help you do that, but you don’t always want the full power of a debugger. Sometimes you just want to spy what’s happening in there.

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So I’ve been struggling a bit with my specifications approach lately. Well, only until I found out about the new Story Runner functionality in rspec. That’s resolved a number of things, by providing a powerful tool to prepare integration tests (in the form of User Stories). From the look of things, it seems like many […]

How do you write specs for a private or protected method? Specifically (as this is often the case), how do you write a spec for a before_filter?
The answers that I found while looking online were not very explicit. The main points seemed to be “don’t test private/protected method”, “you should be specifying expected behaviours in […]

“It’s all about the words”. “Focus on behaviour”. “Design your API as a client of your own API”. “It’s a clearer way to express the same thing, so it helps communication with stakeholders”. Those are all typical responses to the questions “Why is Behaviour Driven Development better than Test Driven Development? Why should I switch […]

Just a short post to mention an issue with TextMate and the rSpec bundle that wasn’t so easy to figure out. There’s not much help on google about this, but I got lucky, so I thought I’d share it here so that if others encounter the same issue.
Sometimes, you might press your rSpec run shortcut, […]

Yesterday I posted an article describing how to do a DRY, readable polymorphic has_many :through join. Since then, I’ve made a few key improvements to them, so I thought I’d share them here.

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