Interesting Things

• The GoGaRuCo call for papers is open!
• There’s a Yammer Drinkup on June 8th.
• You might expect that a where clause like id IN (NULL) would return an empty result set. Interestingly id NOT IN (NULL) also returns an empty result set. Welcome to three-valued logic.
• Be aware that tests may cast Hash to HashWithIndifferentAccess.

# controller.rb

  @list = [{'key' => 'value'}]

# controller_test.rb

  assigns(:list).first.should be_instance_of HashWithIndifferentAccess # passes
  assigns(:list).first.should be_kind_of Hash # passes
  assigns(:list).first.should be_instance_of Hash # fails

Ask for Help

• “What are some pointers for continuously deploying to staging, and maybe production?”

At a bare minimum, you’ll want to deploy only green builds and have a basic monitoring tool like Pingdom. To get the full benefit of continuous deployment, though, you need to be more sophisticated. You’re really interested in whether your latest deploy improved key metrics like conversion, usage and happiness. That gives you information about whether your next commit should pull out that feature or keep building on it. It’s truly rapid iteration with customer feedback, but it takes a lot of charts and graphs and faith that you’re measuring the right things.