In the beginning there was; The Sample Project

Monday, August 27, 2012

It can be stifling to jump into a big project as a new user or team member, you don’t want to accidentally delete stuff, reprioritize iterations etc. We’ve got you covered; try out a sample project. We designed this on purpose as a sandbox for people to poke around and build. Check out this short screencast for a quick demo of how to start a sample project and a few things you can do within it. Create, explore, and don’t be afraid to get lost.

Here’s the breakdown if you don’t want to watch the video.

Go to your dashboard
Press the Create Project + button
Press the Create a sample project button(to the right of Project name field

Standup 08/27/2012: Matthew Kocher has Interests

Jesse Smith

Monday, August 27, 2012

Interestings

git clone –recursive

Clones and inits and updates all the submodules.

Chrome debugger gem

https://github.com/conversation/chrome_debugger seems like it will be useful for something.

[Standup][NY] 08/27/12: Sweet Monday

Evan Goodberry

Monday, August 27, 2012

Interestings

Sugar.js

A new(ish) Javascript library similar to Underscore but that extends objects instead of just providing a function namespace.

Events

Tuesday: NYC.rb Hackfest

[Standup][Boulder] 8/27/12: What week is it again?

Austin Vance

Monday, August 27, 2012

Helps

Any tips for reading HttpPerf?
LogReplay, any good gems or tips to replay requests from server logs?

Interestings

Jeff dean mentioned some strategies dealing with week based reporting, and the oddities that arise when week 0 bleeds into the next year.
Use Date#strf_time

  Week number:
  The week 1 of YYYY starts with a Sunday or Monday (according to %U
  or %W).  The days in the year before the first week are in week 0.
    %U - Week number of the year.  The week starts with Sunday.  (00..53)
    %W - Week number of the year.  The week starts with Monday.  (00..53)

CSS :first-child, :nth-child, and :last-child are not like :eq

Mark Rushakoff

Sunday, August 26, 2012

One mistake I’ve seen made a few times is the notion that CSS’s nth-child pseudoselector acts like jQuery’s :eq pseudoselector.

jQuery’s :eq(n) pseudoselector gives you a single element that is at index n out of all matched elements. While this is certainly a useful selector to have, it’s unfortunately not supported in standard CSS. If you find yourself repeatedly using :eq in your jQuery code, be careful that you are not relying too heavily on :eq to the point where your styles are difficult to match in “pure” CSS.

If we were to express :nth-child in terms of the :eq selector, it would be like using :eqscoped to all of the immediate descendant contents of a single element. Or in my own words, :nth-child adds a constraint to the selector that the matched element must be the nth element in its parent container.

So if we had a snippet of HTML like

<div>
    <div id="bar1" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar2" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar3" class="foo"></div>
</div>

Then the selector .foo:nth-child(2)will match the div #bar2. If we insert another element at the front of the container:

<div>
    <p>Shift!</p>
    <div id="bar1" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar2" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar3" class="foo"></div>
</div>

And again we select .foo:nth-child(2), we match the div #bar1 because the 2nd child of the container also matches .foo.

Thus, in this second example, if we try .foo:nth-child(1) or the equivalent .foo:first-child, we will not match any elements because the first child element in that container — the p tag — does not match .foo.

Likewise, :nth-child can match children in multiple containers. In the HTML snippet:

<div>
    <p>Shift!</p>
    <div id="bar1" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar2" class="foo"></div>
    <div id="bar3" class="foo"></div>
</div>

<div>
     <div id="quux" class="foo"></div>
</div>

the selector .foo:last-child will match the divs #bar3 and #quux; but .foo:first-child or .foo:nth-child(1) will only match #quux because the first child of the first container is, again, not a .foo.

[Standup][SF] 08/24/12

Whitney Schaefer

Friday, August 24, 2012

Helps

Using asset pipeline outside rails

Correlating debugging errors to source files.

Currently using Sprockets template name in-lined. Any better solutions?

Suggestions:

Look at head repo of asset pipline
Middleman gem

[Standup][NY] 08/24/12: Penultimate Summer Friday News

Jonathan Berger

Friday, August 24, 2012

Interestings

FactoryGirl ignored attributes

Ignored/transient attributes are attributes you can pass into a FactoryGirl constructor that you couldn’t pass into a normal model constructor.

They helped us eliminate a lot of setup having to do with associations.

Check it out:
https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl/blob/master/GETTING_STARTED.md#transient-attributes

Suman is the champion! (still)

Suman defended his title and defeated Berry in the finals of the First Annual Summer Intern Farewell Table Tennis Memorial Tournament to win his second championship. Thus a ping pong dynasty is born.

Date.current (respects time zone) vs. Date.today (no time zone)

Date.today and Time.now are Ruby, and do not respect time zone.

Be careful when using things like 1.day.from_now and Date.tomorrow, because these are ActiveSupport methods that DO respect time zone.

If you’re comparing 1.day.from_now to Date.today, these are not equivalent. Use Date.current.

Announcing Pivotal Tracker for iOS 1.5

Christian Niles

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Today we released the latest Pivotal Tracker iOS app to the App Store. This is a major release that includes support for creating attachments, dynamic iteration calculation, and significant performance enhancements. We have also dropped support for iOS 4.x, which less than half of one-percent of our users have installed.

Add Attachments Directly From Your iPhone or iPad

Our customers who use Tracker to develop mobile apps and websites are going to love this: you can now attach photos to stories directly from the app. This makes it super easy to take a screenshot of a bug you find on your iPhone and share it with your team. We’ve been using it ourselves and it’s already our favorite feature.

In addition to attaching screenshots and other photos from your library, the app also supports taking photos directly from the app. This is a great way to capture whiteboards from meetings!

Dynamic Iteration Calculation

Iterations are now calculated dynamically within the app, allowing you to see the effects of your changes on your project’s backlog in real-time. As stories are dragged or edited, iterations will animate and change in response, allowing you to tell whether that change will delay your release or not.

In previous versions of the app, iteration information was calculated on the server and required a lengthy refresh in the app. With this release, you’ll have one less reason to wait while the app downloads the latest data from the server.

Improved Performance & Responsiveness

We’ve expended a lot of effort to ensure that every user of the app has a smooth, stutter-free experience with the app, allowing them to focus on quickly on the task at hand. To that end, our iOS app has been heavily re-engineered to take advantage of the multi-core processors on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and the new iPad.

The UI rendering has also been refined and optimized, resulting in velvety smooth scrolling. This should be true even for large projects!

Other Refinements

Besides the headlined items above, there are numerous small improvements we hope will make the iOS app an even more important part of your daily Tracker rituals:

The acceptance date of a story is now visible and editable, allowing users to backdate accepted stories.
The Search panel now displays an activity indicator while the project is searched for matching stories.
The Search panel is updated as changes are made, ensuring the results are always fresh and accurate.
Downloaded project data is encrypted on disk, ensuring sensitive project information isn’t compromised if the device is lost or stolen. To enable this, you must have a passcode set on your device.
Remote changes to the project are now detected more reliably, and now defaults to every 30 seconds instead of every minute. The change detection interval can be changed or disabled in the Settings app.
After dragging a story, the story is now animated into place.

The Future

Since our iOS app was first released over a year ago, our customers have taken to it quickly. In fact, more customers use the app than don’t. We’re committed to bringing all features from Tracker Web to the iOS app.

Tracker is uniquely able to provide users a “forests and the trees” view of their projects. As small changes are made in a project, Tracker is able to show the macro effects on your velocity and schedule as a result. Dynamic iteration calculation, which shows macro changes to your iterations in real-time as stories are moved, is one of the ways we’ve begun to highlight this unique aspect of Tracker.

Expect future releases to continue this trend, in particular as we begin integrating features like Epics. Stay tuned!

[Standup][SF] 08/23/12: Resqued!

Whitney Schaefer

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Helps

Alternatives to css :contains() selector

We use this selector in many tests, for example the ones that require to click on the link of a specific table row:

within "tr:contains('My Line')" do
    click_link "Edit"
end

This selector however is deprecated, and didn’t make it to css3.

Thus, is it safe to use it in tests?

Suggestions

Iterate over all the links
Put an id on the link
Probably not going away (and contains back in if it breaks)
Data attribute
Xpath – last resort

[Standup][Boulder] 08/23/12: Move a little down and to the right

Austin Vance

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Interestings

Active Record Calculations are Not scoped, be aware.
puts "v" is a newline and a tab character, for all your ascii art apps.

Pivotal Labs

Monthly Archives: August 2012

In the beginning there was; The Sample Project

Standup 08/27/2012: Matthew Kocher has Interests

Interestings

[Standup][NY] 08/27/12: Sweet Monday

Interestings

Events

[Standup][Boulder] 8/27/12: What week is it again?

Helps

Interestings

CSS :first-child, :nth-child, and :last-child are not like :eq

[Standup][SF] 08/24/12

Helps

[Standup][NY] 08/24/12: Penultimate Summer Friday News

Interestings

FactoryGirl ignored attributes

Suman is the champion! (still)

Date.current (respects time zone) vs. Date.today (no time zone)

Announcing Pivotal Tracker for iOS 1.5

[Standup][SF] 08/23/12: Resqued!

Helps

[Standup][Boulder] 08/23/12: Move a little down and to the right

Interestings