2010: Happy Friday Edition

Sarah Mei

Friday, November 5, 2010

Interesting:

bundle install --without test excludes the test group in your Gemfile from the install. It works well for reducing the size of your Heroku slug. However, there’s a glitch with this option on Heroku — when you specify it, Heroku reinstalls every included gem every time you deploy. It does respect your Gemfile.lock, so you’re trading a smaller slug for a longer deploy.
Pivotal’s open source CIMonitor project now supports OpenID! Thanks Tyler and Josh.
Arel has a bug that makes it difficult to use in rails console. Every time you add a predicate, the number of internal objects in the Arel result increases exponentially. So, by the time you have 5 or 6 predicates, the console finishes generating the expression more or less instantly, and then spends 15+ minutes calling to_s on the resulting Arel object in order to display it to you. tl;dr: when you’re playing with Arel in rails console, end every line with ; nil to avoid having it print out the result. The exponential object explosion will be fixed in Rails 3.1.

Standup 11/4/2010: sweeping-up-the-ticker-tape edition

Sarah Mei

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Is it possible in Jasmine to spy on a getter such as myObject[key]? We want to know when local storage is accessed.

No. Jasmine‘s spyOn only works with functions, and in JavaScript getters are not implemented as functions.

Local storage has a functionally equivalent getValue function, which you can spy on, but the spy is not triggered when you access the value via [].

Interesting:

On unicorn, the random number generator is seeded before the fork. So if you are depending on a set of unicorns to generate different random numbers, you need to reseed the random number generator manually after the fork.
If you want to make absolutely sure you aren’t generating any queries in your Rails views, try no_querying_views – which explodes if your query comes from view code.
Other ways to track down inefficient queries that folks have successfully used: bullet and query_reviewer
Skype 5 beta is out for Mac, which allows group video chat. Everyone must be on the beta for it to work.

Oh look a parade!

Sarah Mei

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Help:

Do people put bundler in the Gemfile?

Yes. Bundler is smart enough to omit it from the cache. It does, however, still follow the rules for version. We recommend using ~> 1.0.0 as the version string, because 1.x is supposed to be backwards-compatible with the current Gemfile format.

If you instead use = 1.0.0 and your managed hosting environment updates bundler to something more recent, things will ASPLODE.

Interesting:

Tech talk that was going to be today has moved to Thursday, due mostly to noise concerns. See you tomorrow.

Election Day Special!

Sarah Mei

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Help:

We made a branch in git called “–track” by accident, and now we can’t get rid of it. git thinks it’s a command-line argument, even when it’s in quotes.

Here’s the command what did it:

$ git checkout -b --track origin/actual_branch_name
Branch --track set up to track remote branch refs/remotes/origin/actual_branch_name.
Switched to a new branch "--track"

Consensus: kill it through RubyMine or gitX. There is also a way through the command line:

$ git branch -d -- --track

…but make sure you get the dashes in all the right places.

Interesting:

reset after tail – sometimes, if your PS1 has colors (or square brackets, or … ?) you can lose your Terminal after tailing a file. To get it back, type reset, which should work even if you can’t see it echoing. You may need an extra return before it.
The Giants seem to have won! There’s a parade tomorrow, right in front of the office. If you’re coming for the tech talk, leave extra time as streets will be closed and they’re expecting a crowd.

Standup for St. Patrick's Day

Sarah Mei

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Help:

Testing blocks. If you have a block and you want to spy on the internals as it executes, what do you do? Suggestions were:
- Have each method called internally throw a symbol and check for that.
- Turn it into a proc, and set expectations on that.
- Stub the methods being called internally and set expectations on those.
- pass the block to a spy object.

Other suggestions welcome. The project is using rr, which apparently can’t do this last option, though that would be ideal.

Routes in Rails are case-sensitive? /products/1/edit and /Products/1/edit don’t both resolve to the same place (unless you specify in routes.rb). Rumor has it that the RFC for URIs says that the path portion of a URL is case-sensitive, as opposed to the case-insensitive domain name.

If anyone wants to read through that document and confirm…feel free.

Standup 3/16/2010

Sarah Mei

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Help

Latest Rails book? One pivot is coming back to Rails after several years away. Recommendations: The Rails Way, Rails Guides, Railscasts.

Interesting

The on302 callback is a myth! One team discovered that if you set a 302 (redirect) callback for an AJAX call, like in Prototype, the redirect is followed by the browser and the callback is never called. Suggestions: hack the library so that if the response URL doesn’t equal the request URL, call the on302. Or do that in your application Javascript.

Standup for the Ides of March

Sarah Mei

Monday, March 15, 2010

Help

One team is starting to use Sunspot and is curious about testing strategies. Sunspot provides a method that stubs out the backend, but search blocks aren’t executed, so it’s hard to test actual searching.
Objective C needs a BDD framework. How does Xcode magically know about OCunit? We need to hook in there to have a usable framework.

Interesting

Mountain West Ruby Conf was awesome.