Long-time Pivot Joe Moore had to learn how to effectively remote pair with developers across the country. He shares the lessons he’s learned about the technologies and personal interactions that allow him to remote pair 8 hours a day without going mad.
WebMock 1.7 is out! Danny Burkes had written a gem/monkey-patch for previous versions of WebMock that allowed you to disable or enable it at will. The latest version of WebMock now includes such functionality, and fixes a bug with selenium-webdriver; Danny suggests upgrading WebMock over using his gem.
With all of the chaos on BART as of late, commuters headed to East Bay are in need of alternative transportation. Good news: you don’t have to rely on BART!
“Where in SF should I get a pre-paid SIM card?”
A lot of Pivots in the SF office are visiting from abroad; today we had Mike from our Singapore office wondering how he can get an affordable cell plan while he’s here. The T-Mobile store at 845 Market seems to be the best place.
“
clear_helpersand ActionController::Base”
A [recent?] change to Rails 3 moved helper :all from the default ApplicationController to ActionController::Base — which would be fine, except that there’s little documentation on how to override this (for example, when you don’t want all helpers included in your controller class)
There is a lesser known method from AbstractController::Helpers
# Clears up all existing helpers in this class, only keeping the helper
# with the same name as this class.
def clear_helpers
You would think that since helper :all is being called from the base class, there would be no way to override it. Except for this little bit of code at the bottom of ActionController::Base:
def self.inherited(klass)
super
klass.helper :all if klass.superclass == ActionController::Base
end
So, clear_helpers will “work” for all subclasses of ApplicationController — which is everything you should care about. And the default, all helpers included, remains.
Artifice test pollution: The Lees ran into an issue where every fifth selenium test was failing. They tracked it down to using Artifice to stub responses in their tests. Since Webdriver communicates with the browser through http requests the stubbed Artifice responses were being received by Webdriver, causing unexpected behavior. Be careful stubbing with Artifice or you may accidentally stub all localhost requests.
Devise stretches: Todd found that you can speed up your test suite by turning down Devise’s level of password encryption in your testing environment. He got a 10% bump by including the following code in spec_helper:
Devise.setup do |config| config.stretches = 1 end
For more tips on cutting down your test suite’s run time:
http://www.rubyinside.com/careful-cutting-to-get-faster-rspec-runs-with-rails-5207.html
“What do you tell Rails the default timezone is if your database has no concept like that?”
The best solution was to convert all rows in your DB to UTC and set Rails to also use UTC. There are MySQL commands to convert whole databases over to UTC, and can be run overnight if necessary.
config.legacy_fixture = Dir[path_to_old_fixtures] in your fixture_builder.rb fileRails now includes all helpers across your project in controllers that extends ApplicationController. Apparently there isn’t a setting to override this behavior either, and this is a change from Rails 2 where the scaffold would just include a line at the top of your controller like helpers :all which could easily be deleted.
At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.
Below is the description for a Ruby developer position for Bookish, a new venture backed by some of the biggest publishers in the world, who are redefining the way people discover, explore, and interact with books and authors.
At Bookish our core platform is built in Ruby and Scala, with reading apps built on SproutCore. We love open source and seek to build meaningful contributions for the Ruby and Scala communities. We also run the NYC SproutCore meetup, which will feature Yehuda Katz in September.
This position starts as long-term contract and can become full time.
We love Agile when it’s sensible and foster a fantastic work environment in our 18th Street HQ, next to City Bakery. We have top of the line Mac workstations and accessories, Thursday social hours, Friday lunches, Xbox, and a nap room.
ROLE
We are seeking creative, motivated ROR and JS developers to:
REQUIREMENTS
We seek Ruby and JS experience, but above all generalists who have lots of successes committing at every layer of the stack, ideally on consumer-scale apps. You must write well-structured, readable, well-documented and tested code. (Be able to show us samples of which you are most proud.)
Highly Desirable:
EXPERIENCE
A minimum of 3 years applicable software engineering, with a trail of outstanding references from peers. Reference-able projects you have coded from stem to stern, of any size. Minimally a BA/BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field.
To apply please send the following to careers@bookish.com:
cycle(even, odd): Jonathan pointed out a method in rails that allows you to apply classes to the even and odd numbered indexes of collections, allowing you to easily apply zebra striping patterns to a collection. Peter mentioned the alternative CSS pseudo-selector “nth-child,” which does the same thing with CSS and properly recalculates in the case where you remove an element with AJAX. Unfortunately, nth-child does not work with IE so if you have to support IE, use cycles, otherwise use nth-child.
will_paginate 3.0: Ian mentioned that version 3 of the will_paginate gem was recently released. It now uses scopes, bringing it up to speed with Kaminari, another popular pagination gem.
home_run hates ActiveSupport: JT and Micah pointed out that if you’re adding a duration to a DateTime using home_run, like “DateTime.now + 1.day,” it doesn’t play well with ActiveSupport. It assumes that the number on the right is supposed to be days, which it converts to seconds 86,400 and then changes to days again(86,400 days). The ‘+’ operator has been fixed in edge rails, but not yet back ported. They pointed out that although it doesn’t read well, using #since on any instance of DateTime will act how you would hope the ‘+’ operator would.
[crickets]