Tools

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...

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Also posted in Testing, Web | Tagged capybara, capybara-webkit, cucumber, rails, ruby, ruby on rails, testing | Leave a comment

Balancing safety and convenience

By Chris Farber | Published: February 4, 2012

In most languages, such as C, C++, Ruby, Python, and Java, if you ever attempt to send a message to nil (or dereference a NULL pointer), one of two things will happen: either your program will crash, or a runtime exception will be thrown, which could also lead to your program crashing.

Also posted in Languages, Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Your Business Will Fail Without Maintenance and Improvement

By Jordan Schaenzle | Published: February 1, 2012

Even since cavemen invented the wheel, people have been using specially designed tools to make their work and their day-to-day lives simpler. Can you think of a single profession today that does not benefit from the use of a tool of some kind? In an ideal world, a tool would be something that you invest…

Also posted in Culture, Iterative Development, Process & Practices, Risk, Workplace | Tagged business, maintenance, TDD, tools | Leave a comment

2D Axis Aligned Bounding Box Trees

By Shawn Anderson | Published: January 30, 2012

Here at AO we have a few game developer hobbyists. I’ve been tweaking the basic 2D collision detection in Gamebox for awhile now. When Chipmunk 6 released with performance gains, I decided to take a look. Part of the secret sauce was the use of an axis-aligned bounding box tree (AABB tree). Porting this simple…

Also posted in Design & Development | Tagged data structures, game development, ruby | Leave a comment

Less Perplexing Terminal Multiplexing with tmux

By Mike English | Published: January 28, 2012

Tmux has been getting a lot of attention lately. As George Nachman works toward a deeper integration of iTerm2 with tmux, more people are becoming aware of the ‘other’ terminal multiplexer. Around the office, people have been asking how I use tmux. While I’m also an avid iTerm2 user, I’m not sure if the new…

Also posted in Pairing, Unix, Linux, and Bash | Tagged cli, muliplexer, pairing, screen, terminal, tmux | 1 Comment

Safeguarding Your Productivity

By Justin Kulesza | Published: January 27, 2012

Recently, my Mac greeted me with a kernel panic (an unusual occurrence for most people). It seems that one of the RAM modules in my Mac failed. It shouldn’t have been terribly exciting. Things like this happen. My Mac had two SO-DIMMS (2x4GB) so it shouldn’t have been a problem. Regrettably, when the RAM module…

Posted in Tools | Tagged backups, mac, productivity | 1 Comment

Understand Design or Fail

By Kedron Rhodes | Published: January 26, 2012

Design is a loaded word. It means something different depending who you talk to. For example, design in the context of an innovation services firm (like AO) means something entirely different than design at an ad agency. Unfortunately for many, lack of understanding for what design is and what it can do for products, goods…

Also posted in Design & Development, Visual Design | Tagged design, design thinking, ucd, user centered design | Leave a comment

Highlight strings in Cucumber features with Vim

By Patrick Bacon | Published: January 22, 2012

I 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…

Posted in Tools | Tagged cucumber, macvim, vim | Leave a comment

A Modern Web Development Syllabus

By Micah Alles | Published: January 19, 2012

If you have programming or Computer Science experience, want to take the plunge into web development, and don’t know where to start, then start here. Before you signup for Pusher and Twilio and start copying and pasting Ruby and JavaScript code, you should have a firm understanding of how the many pieces and layers of…

Also posted in Design & Development, Languages, Web | Tagged backbone.js, coffeescript, haml, javascript, mongodb, ruby on rails, SASS | 21 Comments

Using CMock when C is oversensitive

By Job Vranish | Published: January 15, 2012

CMock is an extremely useful tool that can make testing C programs nearly painless. Employing CMock is usually straightforward, but here are a few common sticking points and ways to work around them: