Noel Rappin Writes Here

The title, by the way, is from a favorite scene in a favorite movie. Status Now definitely working on the “dealing with legacy code” chapter, which I am hoping will be substantially more useful than the Lulu version, in that it will cover a few more techniques. I should know later today what the timeline is for beta 4. Links Let’s see what we’ve got today. Nick Quaranto over at Thoughtbot wants you to stop leaving time bombs in your tests.

Book Status And now I turn my lonely eyes to the chapter on testing legacy code. I liked this chapter in the original book, and it’s something I get asked about pretty consistently, so I really want to make it great. Links I’m personally going to spend a lot of time with David Chelimsky’s post about RSpec 2 docs. It’s the best listing I’ve seen so far about changes between RSpec 1 and RSpec 2.

A lot fewer links today. Yesterday, by the way, the most clicked on link was the “Don’t do this” like to the method_missing nil post. Book Status Handed another draft of the Rcov and Style/Test Quality chapters in. Expecting that to be the next beta next week, but we’ll see. Links Kent Beck has a screencast series on TDD from Pragmatic. I linked to the rough version of this some time back.

The end of the repair story At the end, a very positive experience with Apple support. The repair was free, done when they said it would be done, and all told, I spent less than fifteen minutes in the store between both halves of the visit. Plus, they replaced the top part of my pre-unibody MacBook, which was worn down and discolored from my gunky hands, almost as though they didn’t want an ugly Mac in the field.

With my laptop still on the disabled list, I’ve been using the iPad as my primary machine all week. Some thoughts: Overall, it’s been largely non-disruptive, for two reasons. One is that I borrowed a bluetooth keyboard for the duration, and the second is that I’m not in a position at the moment where I need to code on my laptop, since my work site has developer stations. They keyboard changes the iPad experience quite a bit, really turning it into a nice writing station.

It’s kind of hard for me to believe that it’s fifteen years ago this week that I reported for my three-month internship deep in the research department at Apple Computer, down in One Infinite Loop. It was 1995, and it’s beyond understatement to say that Apple was a totally different place then. (I just read an article by a tech pundit who really should have known better that Apple’s marketing has always been great.

No link post today. My laptop is on the 5-7 day disabled list with a busted logic board. So far, a solid experience with Apple support, hopefully the prognosis is accurate. Anyway, unless I can figure out a good, non irritating, way to put together a link post using an iPad, looks like we will be doing something different this week. It’s a little weird that the WordPress web page has a better editor than the iOS.

Link post today. Turns out I built up more links than I thought. Book Status Somehow I wound up writing and editing the Rcov chapter, which, among other things, is the first time I’ve had to wrestle with RSpec 2 vs. RSpec 1 behavior, when writing about how RSpec and Rcov get along. Now I need to figure out how to write about that more coherently. Actually, I need to decide if I’m going to acknowledge RSpec 1 at all.

I think a link post today… Book Status Still working on the style section, for some reason it’s going grindingly slow. The plan for beta 4 is the new style chapter, probably the legacy coding chapter. Also on the slate is updating the sample app to use Devise, which had a large constituency when I floated the idea the other day. Oh, and I haven’t had the link up in a while.

Some of you know (and the rest of you don’t care) that I spend my actual day job working on a largish JRuby on JRails project. (As an aside, I never get tired of jthrowing that extra j onto janything jthat I jcan. When I wrote the “Jython Essentials” book, I desperately wanted to call it “JProgramming Jython”, but eventually sensible people prevailed.) Anyhow… our developer stations run Ubuntu, which meant no TextMate.