Interesting Things

• You can never return: ... except when you can. From a block, that is. Returning from a block rarely works:

  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
   return x
  end
  => LocalJumpError: unexpected return
  

  But, you can pass next and break arguments, which will allow you to assign return values from the block:

  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
    break(x)
  end
  => "one"
  
  
  result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
    next(x)
  end
  => ["one", "two"]
  

You can return from a lambda, though.

• Check out Google Page Speed, which is like Yahoo's YSlow, only "better."

  Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

• Like chef? Love capistrano? Check out chef-deploy, which "... Uses the same directory layout as capistrano and steals the git remote cached deploy strategy from cap and adapts it to work without cap and under chef."

• SFTUG FTW! Another successful SF Tracker User Group Meetup on 06/24. Watch for future events on the Meetup site.

Ask for Help

"Does anyone have Nginx URL rewriting fu?"

The pretty documentation is actually quite hard to work with. Does anyone else have a good reference?

Interesting Things

• Pivotal in the New York Times: Regarding Palm Pre development and our own Tweed:

Some developers who were granted early access to Palm's new operating system said it was worth the wait. "We find it's the easiest one to develop for," said Christian Sepulveda, vice president for business development at Pivotal Labs. "It allows for a richer experience, like having a pop-up menu and background processing, which is helpful."

Mr. Sepulveda's company developed four of the first programs available for download through Palm’s app store, including an item for Twitter called Tweed.

• The next SF Ruby Meetup will be held here at Pivotal Labs. Sign up) and attend!
• BART strike warning! In the Bay Area we take our commute options seriously. Here are your options if BART goes on strike

Ask for Help

"Has anyone implemented mutli-table (class table) inheritance in Rails, as apposed to single table inheritance (STI)?"

• There are some plugins that nobody has tried, such as inherits_from
• What about a view to represent the super set of tables and rows?

"We're looking for a dead-simple, drop-in JS rating or 'starting' plugin."

Check out the start-rating jQuery plugin. Any other suggestions?

Interesting Things

• RubyMine 1.1 + Latest Mac OS X Java Upgrade + configuring RubyMine to work with Java 1.6 = Complex FAIL. We downgraded to RubyMine 1.0.5 and it works again.

At Pivotal Labs, our clients, customers, and developers love Pivotal Tracker; after all, we wrote it and selfishly kept it to ourselves for 2 years! With that much history, some of our Tracker projects have built up thousands of stories, and keeping these stories organized is a challenge. Luckily, we designed Tracker with a simple yet powerful organizational tool: Labels. Here are some labeling patterns we find useful.

As web developers in the Web 2.0 world, we work with transparencies and gradients all the time. Sometimes we get a bunch of assets from a designer and can't easily see how the visual assets are constructed: what parts are transparent? Is the background grey or transparent? How drastically does a gradient fade? Get some answers quickly by tweaking OS X Preview.

On April 29, 2009 Pivotal Labs hosted the inaugural San Francisco Pivotal Tracker User's Group. It was a great success! As an avid Pivotal Tracker user (and sometimes developer) for over 3 years I am very interested in making Tracker a better product and teaching others how to use Tracker to improve their organization.

Here are a few thoughts I took away from the meeting, and a few tips and tricks.

Pivot Corey gave a brown-bag lunch talk titled "There is No Such Thing as a CSS Class" (slides and notes) where he describes establishing a project specific "CSS System." This excellent presentation complements the "Consistent and Effective CSS" talk (video and live demo available) given by Pivots Corey, Ryan, and Chris.

At Pivotal, we love our large, shared workspace and homogeneous workstations. As we move from project to project, our workstations are pretty much the same: iMacs with TextMate, RubyMine, Quicksilver (bound to ⌘+space, of course!) a full Ruby/Rails stack, and a few other applications. Given this minimal setup, I can figure out which developers have used a particular workstation given the extra applications installed upon it. I've come to see certain applications as a developer's "tag," like a graffiti signature.

• Silverflow for Quicksilver: Pivot David G. was here!
• iStat menues: David S. been here!
• Microsoft IntelliType for Mac: Jonathan B. tagged this machine.

As for me, if you see and , then I've tagged your machine.

What are your tags?

At Pivotal, we are passionate about test driven development, keeping things DRY, and writing readable and understandable code. Satisfying all of these desires can be challenging, especially when writing test code. In particular, ActiveRecord extensions present several challenges: which models using an extension should we test? How do we both test our extension in isolation while also testing all model's usage of that extension? Is it even worth it?

The answer is yes, it is worth it, and it's also fairly easy, readable, understandable, and DRY. I will present both a common problem and a solution, using a cumulation of technologies and techniques from multiple Pivotal projects, in particular using acts_as_fu to create laser-targeted, isolated, and disposable ActiveRecord models for testing extensions and RSpec shared behaviors to minimize the amount of duplicated test code.