Interesting Things

• Google Code Jam. Some clients and Pivots are going to be in the office on Friday for the Google Code Jam. Come out and hack!
• Epics have officially launched on Pivotal Tracker. More information on the Tracker blog
• Free HTML books for babies. Insightful, inspiring, clever, full of Helvetica. We laughed, we cried. If you missed the free copies, check them out online.

The post [Standup][SF] 11 April 2012 – <title>Hello World, I’m a baby</title> appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Ask for Help

Has anyone used Pusher.com?

General consensus was that people have heard of the service, but no one has used it.

Interesting Things

• Don't use let(:test_*) in Rspec 1. If you do, Rspec will run the let block as an assertion. Rspec 1 was retrofitted with the let framework, which creates named methods that can be lazily evaluated inside of test examples. Ruby's Test::Unit, which powers Rspec 1, will run all let blocks unnecessarily if prefixed with "test_". In some cases, this could make method spy expectations fail.

• Route specs do not test for the existence of controller actions. They only check for the mapping of routes to controller actions. This is partially due to the fact that a controller method isn't necessary for rendering a page, so a route could legitimately point to a controller without the listed action and would still work. There is a Stack Overflow discussion that explains the logic behind that decision. Integration and controller specs were proposed as alternatives to routing specs.

• Pivotal Labs is now 24th on the CoderWall leaderboard! Further proof that we're the awesome sauce.

The post [Standup][SF] 9 April, 2012 – Scaling the CoderWall appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Interesting Things

It turns out NTP, the service that keeps our Unix boxes synced with international time servers, is lazy on the client side.

At Pivotal, our Macs sync up to time.apple.com to accurately reflect the time. This server isn't lazy and will give back the current time when queried.

However, the NTP client-side daemon on our Macs has drifted as far off as 30 seconds because it isn't actively polling time.apple.com. This can lead to strange errors (like longer download times than usual from certain servers). The simple fix is to reconnect to time.apple.com, or the NTP server of your choice.

The post Standup 7/8/2011: Lazy time appeared first on Pivotal Labs.

Interesting Things

Pivotal Tracker is now available as a free iPad app in the iOS App Store! It's based on the popular TrackerBot app from Vulpine Labs, which was recently acquired by Pivotal Labs. Dan Posedly gives more details over at his Pivotal blog.

The post Standup 7/6/2011: Pivotal Tracker, Apple style appeared first on Pivotal Labs.