Noel Rappin Writes Here

Book Status

Beta 5 came out on Wednesday. Currently trying to figure out how to structure the Shoulda chapter in light of the direction that project has gone in since I wrote about it for the Lulu book.

Friday Links

One significant change in Rails 3 is that, because of the way Bundler works, the code for your gems is not part of the project. And if you are using RVM, each project might have a different gemset, and different directory to find those gems. Brian Cardarella has a simple script that will open a new tab in your terminal window and take it to the gem directory for the current project. OS X only, because it uses AppleScript. I will use this.

Mike Burns from Thoughtbot gives us a just-so story for the digital age, How grep got its name. I always thought it was the sound you make when you try and figure out how to use it, “Oh Grep!”

Derek Kastner of Brighter Planet has an interesting look at how to use more advanced features of Bundler to to manage gem dependencies when building a gem, and creating the gemspec. Definitely something I would not have figured out on my own.

Matt Aimonetti, after doing a little Ruby memory quiz/rant on Twitter last night has published a longer blog post about Ruby’s object allocation. This is interesting, and makes me wonder if it would be possible to build a Ruby runtime optimized for long-running processes. Still, make it work, make it right, make it clean, only then make it fast – it’s much easier to optimize clean code.

Louis Rose has a short snippet or three on using Timecop and Chronic to manage time-based Cucumber scenarios. Read through to the updates to avoid a couple of gotchas. Chronic, by the way is one of my favorite gems to use in projects, because clients often like the demo of being able to type in “next Tuesday” in a date field.

Finally, Yehuda Katz has what is maybe the first “I switched to Vim” story that makes me actually think about switching to Vim. Seems like a useful approach and set of tips.