Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Testing Velocity Part 2 - Why do we test?

A couple weeks ago, I began a series on keeping your test suite fast and effective. I now am going to digress a bit, take a step back and view the big picture to establish context.
Before addressing test performance and what makes up a good test, we should ask ourselves why is it that […]

Testing Velocity - Keeping your test suite fast, Part 1

If you are a Ruby or Rails developer, and you know what you are doing, you are writing tests or specs. Tests express the intent of your code, help verify correctness, and aid in design and exploration. Rails gives you helpful conventions to follow and functional and integration testing support for free out […]

Tarantula, Rails super-fuzzer, released

Stu has finally released Tarantula over on the main Relevance blog. Tarantula is probably the most exciting open source release Relevance has put out since I’ve joined the company about half a year ago. It basically will crawl your app intelligently, try putting garbage into forms and query params, and give you a […]

Why I use test/spec over rspec

…the worst thing that can happen to a code base is size. — Steve Yegge

Project
LOC

RSpec
15581

test/spec
1512

bacon
477

(Lines of code counted with sloccount, adding up only results from the lib and test (or spec) directories for each of the latest gems.)

Nothing to it but to do it

A guy in college I knew had a catch phrase he would say often, to the point of annoyance. Its stuck with me since then, and rings true all the time:

Nothing to it but to do it

Of course, I remember him saying this most often when embarking on a beer run, but thats […]

Relevance is looking for two super ninja hackers

My company, Relevance is looking to hire two more full time people. We are based in Chapel Hill, and we want everyone to be colocated or open to relocation.
In my short tenure here at Relevance (little over three months), I can safely say that this is the closest I’ve ever been to my perfect […]

Less Magic, Please

My development style tends towards less and less metaprogramming and magic these days. Its not for lack of ability or lack of capable coworkers. I work with some pretty sharp people, and I know they can grok whatever sort of voodoo method_missing module_eval mysticism I can throw at them. But lately I […]

iPhone price whining

I find it strange that Russ is complaining about today’s iPhone price drop of $200. Russ is knows how fast the mobile market moves, so he should know better. He says:
Happily screwing the early adopters and rewarding the laggards is something only Apple can do with a smile, no?
No, actually, its pretty much […]

BDD in Rails - test/spec and rspec

I've been playing a bit with test/spec lately in attempts to start doing more BDD. I've been following RSpec, the better known Ruby BDD library for awhile, but decided against it since it just doesn't look practical for use in an established project with around ~400 test cases. It also seems that development [...]

Friday Night Randomness

Bored and procrastinating. Might as well link some things up for you, gentle reader.

Deprecations coming in Rails 1.2 - prepare yourself
Serious vulnerability in Ruby's CGI libary (1.8.5 and below!) - you are effected if you are using Mongrel, plain CGI, or Litespeed - you are NOT effected if you are using FastCGI. See [...]