Rails convention calls for test data to be stored in fixtures. This works very well for the first few iterations, but this approach quickly becomes unwieldy. Often, many records are required, which can lead to poor record names like event_46. Even when naming conscientiously, it’s difficult to give each record a meaningful name in a global scope. When adding required fields to models, every record needs to be updated, which can be tedious for large test data sets, and very often the updates have an undesired impact on a broad set of tests.

We’d prefer to build up test data closer to home, in the test itself, so we can see the connection between the data and the expectations. Furthermore, if we structure our tests this way the data is isolated from other tests so we’re free to tinker with it without breaking those other tests. The drawback is that manual creation of ActiveRecord objects in your test code can become as tedious to write and maintain as fixtures.

Enter Generate – a technique that centralizes ActiveRecord model generation for test data, removes the need for fixtures, and avoids the tedium and verbosity of in-test model creation.

I resisted the urge for a pun about meeting the "Atoms Family" or some cringe-inducing line.

We've had some new Atoms join the Molecule (Nate Lokers & Eric Hass). And, we decided it was time to update everybody's bios on our website. We get really positive feedback from customers and potential customers about our bios. The visibility into our company and culture via the bios seems to really connect well with the outside world. So much so that we give periodic attention to them and always feature them as a link on our website's front page.

So, feel free to poke around and meet the Atomic Object Molecule.

We continue to look for good people to hire. If you're interested, start the process.

UPDATED (Aug. 10, 2008): Links removed from Nate & Eric as they no longer work for us.

A Comic by Eric Burke:

via [stuff that happens]