Pivot David Stevenson introduces Remarkable and Contextually, testing tools that can be used on top of RSpec. Remarkable is tool that makes testing common ActiveRecord and ActionController functionality more declarative, making tests shorter and more legible. Remarkable is used heavily in Contextually, a role-based testing framework that simplifies testing the behavior of controllers against a variety of roles. David shares his experience and metrics from using these tools on a recent project.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Isaac Hall of Recurly describes many of the hidden challenges in managing recurring billing online. He offers step-by-step tips, tricks, and firsthand experience on how to better architect and more easily deploy billing in your application.

Isaac put up a synopsis of the main ideas on the Recurly site.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Three new Tech Talks have been posted to our talks page:

• MDD: How TDD and BDD Miss the Point – Terralien Founder Nathaniel Talbott introduces Metric Driven Development, or MDD. Exclusive focus on TDD and BDD can miss the bigger picture and drive optimizations that negatively impact the business as a whole. Part business talk and part technical talk, Nathaniel discusses what MDD is, why you should be doing it from day one, and what cool Ruby tools you can leverage to make it happen.

• Aristotle and the Art of Programming – Jon Dahl ponders the big questions. What can programmers learn from the thought of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill? More than you might think. He links philosophical ethics and ideas to the processes, tools, and methodologies of software development as we discuss a critical question: is successful development primarily a matter of finding the right rules, creating the right outcomes, or cultivating the right virtues?

• Introduction to MongoDB -
  MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Mike Dirolf of 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, will discuss the features that make it an interesting choice as a datastore for web applications. He will give examples of how to interact with MongoDB from Ruby and discuss how MongoDB’s auto-sharding allows it to provide infinite scalability.