We're hiring!

We're actively seeking developers & designers for our new Detroit location. Learn more

These intermittent test failures will not stand, man

By Patrick Bacon | Published: April 27, 2012
I recently spent some time cleaning up a large test suite that had fallen into a bit of disrepair. The project was a Ruby on Rails web application being tested with RSpec and Cucumber. The biggest problem was that various tests would fail intermittently. Some tests would pass consistently when run by themselves, but would...

Read More »
Posted in Testing, Tools, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Learn Vim with Spaced Repetition

By Patrick Bacon | Published: March 20, 2012
Last fall I started using Vim as my full-time text editor. Around that same time I came across a fascinating article from Wired titled Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm. The article is about Piotr Wozniak and the spaced repetition algorithm he developed called SuperMemo. SuperMemo is based on the...

Read More »
Posted in Tools, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Given I am signed in using capybara-webkit

By Patrick Bacon | Published: February 20, 2012
Inspired by the blog post Capybara, Cucumber and How the Cookie Crumbles, I wanted to write a Cucumber step that signs a user directly into my application, without the need to navigate to a log-in page and submit a form. I am not thrilled about the stubbing and monkey patching discussed in that post, and...

Read More »
Posted in Testing, Tools, Web | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Highlight strings in Cucumber features with Vim

By Patrick Bacon | Published: January 22, 2012
Cucumber highlighting in VimI am currently working on a project that is using Cucumber for its system/integration testing, and I am using MacVim as my primary editor. MacVim comes with Tim Pope’s excellent vim-cucumber plugin pre-installed, so you get syntax highlighting of .feature files right out of the box. After having used TextMate to edit Cucumber features in...

Read More »
Posted in Tools | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Authentication and CouchDB

By Patrick Bacon | Published: December 22, 2011
I needed to expose an internal CouchDB server to the outside world. When it was only accessible behind a firewall, it was not a big deal to throw an Admin Party. But opening it up to the outside world meant having to figure out how to lock down the CouchDB server. This post collects some...

Read More »
Posted in Tools, Web | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

libiconv problems with MAMP, PHP, and Ruby

By Patrick Bacon | Published: November 17, 2011
This past week I was having some trouble with a PHP application that tries to shell out to an external Ruby script. The problem was only occuring on my development MacBook Pro, where I had installed MAMP 2.0.5 to run the application. I was able to hit the straight PHP pages without a problem. But...

Read More »
Posted in Tools, Unix, Linux, and Bash, Web | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Upload Files Directly to S3 with Plupload, Rails, and Paperclip

By Patrick Bacon | Published: October 31, 2011
Plupload is an open source javascript upload handler that supports uploading files directly to Amazon S3. This is an alternative to uploading files to the web server, and then to S3. You will need to use the Flash or Silverlight options to upload directly to S3 because Amazon has yet to enable cross-origin uploading.
Posted in Tools, Web | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Run Tests From MacVim via Terminal.app or iTerm.app

By Patrick Bacon | Published: September 27, 2011
For the past several weeks I have been using MacVim as my primary editor for Ruby coding. My workflow has been to edit some code, Command-Tab over to a Terminal window and run a test by either typing the command, or using the up-arrow to run the same test I had already typed in. This...

Read More »
Posted in Design & Development, Tools, Unix, Linux, and Bash | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Chaining jQuery Ajax Calls

By Patrick Bacon | Published: August 24, 2011

Starting with version 1.5, jQuery has provided Deferred Objects to make working with asynchronous functions a little easier. A canonical example of its usage might be: $.getJSON(’/dataz’).then(function(objects) { alert(’I got some json data: ‘ + objects.length); }); I was recently working on some code that required making a number of sequential Ajax requests where the…

Read More »

Posted in Tools, Web | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Breaking Down Epic Stories

By Patrick Bacon | Published: July 20, 2011

A couple of years ago I wrote about how I was using Epic stories for early project estimations. Recently John Rusk posted a question in the comments: I have a question about this: “We make no attempt to restrict that the total number of points from the resulting stories adds up to the previous estimate…

Read More »

Posted in Estimating, Project Management | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments