Matthew Lang // My Programming Journal

My name is Matthew Lang, and I'm a programmer and Ruby hobbyist based just outside Glasgow in the UK.

Snippets #55

Launching Ruby on Rails projects, the video - Robby Russell's talk from Rails Underground is now available as a video.
Absolute dates make tests brittle - Great little tip if your using fixtures to test your Rails app.
Ninja testing your Rails plugins - I'll be using this guide to write my first plugin soon.

rewteet - This is a Sinatra application template that allows you to build a key-based aggregator application for Twitter. If your also curious about how some Sinatra applications are set up with regards to things like testing, then this is a great application to delve into.
dotiw - A plugin for Rails that provides more accurate distance of time in words.
Planting the seeds - Robby Russell has a great article covering the new seed data feature in Rails.

Internbot Chronicles #4: CI & Test Metrics - Nick Quaranto at Thoughtbot shares his notes on how they’re setting up continuous integration and automated code checking.
Sortable - A new plugin to replace acts_as_list.
ADSF - A dead simple fileserver you can launch from any directory.
Sketches - Create and edit Ruby code while having it reloaded in your IRB. Nice!

Mac-friendly Autotest - A better performing Autotest gem which doesn’t hog resources from your Mac.
Stories - A story and user acceptance test library for the Contest framework. If BDD is your thing, then this might be worth a look.
Hammock - A Rails plugin for eliminating code in a RESTful manner. Looks like a great way to get skinny controllers.