RubyTapas Freebie: Gem Love Part 2
I have a few ongoing miniseries in RubyTapas. In this, the second installment of a miniseries chronicling the creation of a Rubygems plugin and an associated server, I touch on…
Creating Cowsays.com Part 2: Unit Tests and Cow Files
Part two in my “live”-style screencast series is now available! Watch me code up a small web app from scratch using test-driven development. In this hour-long episode, I switch from…
Making a Mockery of TDD
I made this gnomic remark on Twitter the other day: To be a successful mockist, you must dislike mocks. A lot of people re-tweeted it, so I guess I’m not…
5 things programmers preach but don’t practice
I’m having a frustrating day of merge hell. Just to blow off some steam while specs run, here are some things that, in my experience, are a lot more common in…
Demeter: It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.
Is #try really so bad? In response to my recent post about #try being a code smell, a lot of people made the reasonable objection that the example I used—of…
Linkdump #7
Hacker Chat: Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More Wise words. tags: development I think many developers (myself included) are easily seduced by new…
RSpec is for the literate
A couple years ago I wrote a library called AlterEgo. It’s an implementation of the State Pattern for Ruby. I consider the library to be retired at this point—other libraries,…
Roy Osherove on Test Construction
It’s quite easy to get caught up in the technique of TDD and not pay attention to the way unit tests are written: their naming, how maintainable or readable they…
TDD Accelerates Development
Periodically, well-meaning Agile advocates will make the argument that practicing Test-Driven Development trades development speed for better quality. That is, it slows you down but it’s worth it because the…
Complex Hash Expectations in RSpec
When spec-ing something that calls method which takes a set of nested hashes (as many Rails methods do), it may be tempting to use #hash_including: to test for only the…