Patrick Bacon on Atomic Spin

Safely Parsing Parameters from a Rails Log

A technique to parse the request parameters from a Rails log back into a Ruby hash.

Web Apps

These Intermittent Test Failures Will Not Stand, Man

I rid a large test suite of intermittent failures. Here are some of the causes of the random failures and what I did to prevent them from failing.

Developer Tools

Learn Vim with Spaced Repetition

Resources for using a spaced repetition algorithm to learn Vim and its commands.

Web Apps

Given I Am Signed in Using capybara-webkit

Directly authenticate a user from a Cucumber step by setting a cookie using capybara-webkit.

Developer Tools

Highlight Strings in Cucumber Features with Vim

An "after" syntax file that adds highlighting to double quoted strings in Cucumber feature files when using tpope's vim-cucumber plugin.

DevOps & System Admin.

Authentication and CouchDB

This post collects some of the articles and code snippets I tracked down while researching how to secure a CouchDB server.

Web Apps

libiconv Problems with MAMP, PHP, and Ruby

Solution to a problem executing a Ruby script from PHP using MAMP on Mac OS X where the wrong libiconv was being picked up.

Web Apps

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

A description of uploading files directly to Amazon S3 from the browser using Plupload, Ruby on Rails, and Paperclip.

Developer Tools

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

AppleScript and Vimscript for running Ruby tests being edited in MacVim in either Terminal.app or iTerm.app. Works with Rspec, Cucumber, and Test::Unit tests.

Web Apps

Chaining jQuery Ajax Calls

An example of sequentially chaining jQuery Ajax requests using deferred objects and deferred.pipe.

Project & Team Management

Breaking Down Epic Stories

A discussion of what to do when an Epic story is broken down into smaller stories and the point totals don't add up.

Web Apps

Finding an Element Using jQuery’s andSelf() Function

An example using jQuery's andSelf, filter, and find functions to locate an element starting with the element itself instead of only looking at its descendants.

Patrick Bacon

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