Rubber Duck Session: Rails Polymorphic Attributes with Karim Talek
In this public Rubber Duck Session, my pairing partner Karim wanted to move some logic for editing message-display rules from the frontend to the backend. We settled on using JSONB…
How to relax your Ruby version specification in your Gemfile
Have you ever run into this error? Your Ruby version is 2.6.1, but your Gemfile specified 2.6.3 Annoying, right? You know your Ruby version is new enough to run this…
In defense of fat tools
Rails has this thing called the “flash”. It’s like a special subset of the session hash. It’s a key/value store with an enforced short lifespan. Stuff you put in the…
Configuring database_cleaner with Rails, RSpec, Capybara, and Selenium
How I avoid finding myself in database bizarro world while testing Rails apps.
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…
New maintainer needed for NullDB
NullDB, for those who don’t know, is a null backend for ActiveRecord. Unlike RSpec’s stub_object, rather than raise an exception on DB access, will NullDB DB interactions simply become no-ops….
Early access beta of “Objects on Rails” Now Available
UPDATE: Objects on Rails is now complete and freely available online. Often, at conferences and users group meetings, I find myself discussing the intersection of Ruby on Rails, Object-Oriented development, and Test-Driven…
DRYing up your validations using DB reflection
Avoiding silent truncation of your model fields requires putting length validations on them. But this can introduce duplication of knowledge. In this post I demonstrate how to pull limit information directly from the DB into your model validations.
View Sandboxes for Rails
Designing HTML views is an iterative, interactive process by nature. And anything that slows down the iterations, slows down development. I was working on a form recently where the steps…
RailsConf, BohConf, DCRUG Video
DCRUG First off, I had a great time at DCRUG last night. I enjoyed getting a peek at Jeff Casimir‘s “pre-alpha” presentation on Rails views. And Joel Strait‘s live demo…