Noel Rappin Writes Here

And Now A Word

The schedule for WindyCityRails 2010 just came out. WindyCityRails is Saturday, Sept, 11 at the Westin Chicago River North.

I will be running the PM tutorial session on “Testing in a Legacy Environment”. I am frequently asked how to start testing on a pre-existing code base with no tests. In this session, we’ll start with a made-up “legacy” code base, and discuss techniques for adding tests, and fixing bug, and adding new features in a test-driven way.

I’m excited, and I think it’s going to be a fun and useful session. WindyCityRails is an extremely well done conference, and you all should check it out. There’s an early bird registration price, which is good until August 1st. You can register here.

I hope to see you there.

Book Status

The legacy chapter draft heading to editor today. Next up is probably the Rails 3/Devise instructions and tutorial updates. The book is still available for purchase in beta, and for pre-order on Amazon.

Links

Via Corey Haines, here’s an interesting mini-essay on refactoring and cleanup from J. B. Rainsberger on the TDD mailing list.

I’m putting this link here so that I never have to do a Google search for HTML entity definitions ever again. (Via larkware).

Another “Why I Like Ruby” essay, this one from Rob Conery.

Alex Chaffee from Pivotal Labs has an RSpec add-on that shows you the exact location where an expected string differs from the returned value. If you have ever tried to track down string issues in a long string where the spacing turns out to be different 150 characters down the line, this will be a good thing to have around.

James Golick released two gems that help in production deployment of new features. The rollout gem helps limit a particular feature to a subset of users, even allowing for quick de-activation of a feature if needed. As a companion, the degrade gem allows you to automatically remove a feature (or trigger other behavior) when a certain number of errors are triggered.