Noel Rappin Writes Here

Now that the new book is public, I’m going to start doing more frequent status updates. It’s going to be weird for me, after keeping the project under wraps for so long, but I’m sure we will all get by. When the book, shall we say, reverted back to me, I had two immediate questions: what to write, and how to deliver it to a (hopefully) desiring public. Let’s talk about the content first, though in practice, I needed to make sure I had a tool chain I liked before proceeding.

Hello, and welcome to my new site, noelrappin.com. I have a new site because now that I have another book to promote, having the site be named after the previous book seemed perhaps not in keeping with the best marketing practices. Speaking of the new book, it’s called Mastering Space and Time With JavaScript, and you can find out more information about it. The book should go on sale in June, if you’d like to be notified, please fill out the handy interest form.

The key to fast tests is simple: don’t do slow things. Warning: this post is a kind of long examination of a problem, namely, how to integrate fast non-Rails tests and slow Rails tests in the same test suite. This may be a problem nobody is having. But having seen a sample of how this might work, I was compelled to try and make it work in my toy app. You’ve been warned, hope you like it.

Here’s what I’ve got. 2 chapters introducing jQuery and Jasmine via a walkthrough of a simple piece of JavaScript functionality. 1 need to convert all my text from its current proprietary format to something more Markdown based. 1 genuinely silly conceit tying together the application that gets built in the book. And I mean that in the best way. It should be silly, there’s no reason not to be bold. There is even a twist ending.

So… The JavaScript book that I had contracted to do with Pragmatic will no longer be published by them. I need to be careful as I write about this. I don’t want to be defensive – I’m proud of the work I did, and I like the book I was working on. But I don’t want to be negative either. Everybody that I worked with at Pragmatic was generous with their time and sincere in their enthusiasm for the project.

Everything I know about the world of fine dining I know from watching Top Chef and from eating at Five Guys. But I do know this: chefs have the concept of mise en place (which does not mean Mice In Place), which is the idea that everything the chef is going to need to prepare the food is done ahead of time and laid out for easy access. The advantages of having a good mise en place include time savings from getting common prep done together, ease of putting together meals once the prep is done, ease of cleanup.

If I don’t write about iOS editors every few months, then it’s harder for me to justify continuing to mess around with them… The thing that’s changed my editor use in the last couple of months is iaWriter Mac and iOS adding iCloud support, even more deeply integrated than Apple’s own applications. iaWriter is the first writing program I use to move to the iCloud future (though there are some games and other programs that also sync via iCloud already).

This week I wound up trying to put together a sample “real-world” problem suitable for use in an automated web thing aimed at potential new hires. Of course, any actual “real-world” problem would be have too many extraneous details to make it suitable given the constraints of the web thing, but trying to create the illusion of real-world-ness was kind of fun. Since this seemed like sort of a weird way to spend a day or two, I decided to make it weirder by implementing both my solution to the problem and the code to generate test data in a language I don’t use every day.

I present to you two things that sound like they should be metaphors for project issues. Except for two things: They are real I have no idea what they might be metaphors for The Library Book Priority Conundrum I read a lot. In general, I purchase books I’m very excited about reading, and books that I’m less sure about I check out from my local library.

If I’m counting right, Ruby Midwest is my fifth conference this year, which is I guess one of the perks of having an employer that likes being involved in the community. It’s great – I like meeting all the smart people involved with Ruby, I learn things, and sometimes people ask me to sign my book. (Okay, that happened once. Still, that’s more than zero.) At the risk of shooting myself in the foot forty-eight hours before I go give my own talk, here’s a list I compiled for a lightning talk at a recent Groupon Geekfest, entitled 10 Things That Drive Me Crazy About Conference Presentations.