TL;DR

Estimating performance stories are total bike-shed conversations.

1. Write a figure-out-what-to-do story which generates the knowledge to estimate #2 (with repeatable benchmarks)
2. Now estimate and execute the actual story around doing the optimization (and compare benchmarks)
3. Repeat until your slowness is gone

Ask for Help

"BART will be striking for an indefinite period of time starting Monday"

Somewhat scary for those of us trying to get into the city... good luck to everyone else in the same predicament.

"Has anyone used geminstaller to install Passenger?"

It appears not.

Interesting

"EngineYard's Solo offering now has a feature called quickstart"

The Solo Linux OS image which is built to run on Amazon's EC2 apparently has a new quickstart feature that lets people drop a git repository link into their web interface and self configures things appropriately. Pretty interesting.

"RabbitMQ is a viable option for projects"

RabbitMQ has been vetted and so far has proven to be stable, fast, and reliable, despite a few things we had to iron out first. Pretty cool new technology with some good Ruby integration in the form of the amqp gem. This website had a similar experience with RabbitMQ, AMQP, and Rails.

"Rails code committers inside Pivotal now get t-shirts denoting that fact for their efforts"

Sweet ;).

Despite being a Ruby shop, we do have our hands in some Java issues...

Ask for Help

"Anyone know of a good Rhino Javascript book?" (He was looking for more information on the Javascript implementation using Java and related information)

Nope :(.

"What is the status of finding out how to sandbox Java"

Still in progress.

Interesting

Changing the Java version from 1.5 to 1.6 in Mac OSX is painful.

• It may be tempting to manually install Java and then just change the link (in some file called "a"), but this is wrong and spits out warnings.

• Most options can be set using:

  /Applications/Utilities/Java\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/Java\ Preferences

and then setting $JAVA_HOME is up to you.

• Arun Gupta seems to have documented more of the process for more reading and installation details.

Ask for Help

"My method stub only works on the first RSpec example and clearing in subsequent examples, what's wrong?"

Using RSpec, it is common to mock out certain aspects of your code to change functionality for testing. This is accomplished using the "stub" method and passing the method name as a symbol.

SomeObject.stub(:some_method_to_modify).and_return do something_else() end

As we like to keep our code nice and DRY, we often pull things into "before" blocks. Unfortunately, this can cause some confusion as

describe "ObjectA" do
    before :all do
        ObjectB.stub!(:some_method_ObjectA_depends_on).and_return(15)
    end

    it "can test something" do
        ...
    end

    it "can test something else" do
        Objectb.some_method_ObjectA_depends_on
    end

end

will have ObjectB.some_method_ObjectA_depends_on actually executing ObjectB's method instead of stubbing. This is because after each example ("it" block), all stubs are cleared from all objects, leaving the stubs only effective in the first example.

Ask for Help

"Does anyone know of the best current Date-Time picker for Javascript?"

*Tim Harper's Calendar Date Select was recommended for its simplicity and rails integration.

Simply install the gem and add it as a project dependency:

sudo gem install calendar_date_select
config.gem "calendar_date_select"

And insert into your Rails code:

<%= calendar_date_select_includes "red" %>

And voila, you have an intuitive time and date selector:

Check out the live Demo.

*Yahoo's Javascript toolkit was determined to work well for people in need of a date and time selection GUI.