Noel Rappin Writes Here

You got your Rails in my JavaScript… Previously on Locally Sourced: Well, in 2005 I came across a cool web framework called Ruby on Rails. More recently, I wrote a book about integrating Rails and front-end tools. If you want, you could buy it. Today, I thought I’d go back to the beginning… Over the fifteen or so years that Rails has been around, the relationship between Rails and client-side JavaScript has gone in many different directions.

Or: Trust Goes Every Which Way, And Makes Agile Work Previously on Locally Sourced: I attempted to justify all this agile stuff. Before that, more agile stuff. Also, I have a book out, and good marketing practices would suggest I mention that from time to time. This time around, I’m worried that all these words won’t help make the central point: Everybody on a software team should feel included and safe in their work because it’s the right thing to do.

I mean, really… Previously on Locally Sourced: I wrote about an XP practice. Then I wrote about it some more. Then I wrote about a different XP practice. Then I wrote about it some more. (Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch, but a domain metaphor was an XP practice, and OO modeling went hand in hand.) In any case, with more about Agile and XP coming up, I thought it was time for some self-justification.

Maybe more about the past than you needed to know? Previously on Locally Sourced: I wrote about kinds of object-oriented design. Before that, I asked why you hired that test. I didn’t exactly set out to write 1300 words on the history of OO design, but I pulled out some old books and got nostalgic. Tune in next week for more on Agile, communication, and inclusion. As I was writing the last post, I started skimming through a couple of my Object-Oriented textbooks from the mid-90s.

Who doesn’t love a taxonomy? Previously on Locally Sourced: We talked about test speed, and we asked why you hired that test? If you like this kind of thing, tell a friend or colleague. One thing that I see a lot in online discussion of programming styles is the idea that Object-Oriented Programming is just one thing that you either do, or don’t do. I think that’s reductive, and not just because different languages encourage different structures in objects.

Previously On Locally Sourced: The Entropy Essays are a series of essays about how programming practices inspired by Extreme Programming such as testing, pair programing, and object-oriented design play out on modern web projects. The first one was about test speed. And eventually we’ll get to why they are called Entropy Essays. I want you to stop for a second and think: “why are you writing this test?” Not “why are you writing tests in general?

Yes, I really do need 700 LEGO bricks in order to flip that light switch… Program note: This essay is timed to the release of the draft-complete beta of Modern Front-End Programming with Rails. They won’t all be about the book, promise. (There will be one or two more about the book). There will be more Entropy Essays in the future about testing, object-oriented design, pairing, and so on… Something interesting happened as I was finishing up the book.

Speed matters. But not precisely. There are only two things that matter when thinking about the speed of your automated tests: How fast can you run the relevant set of tests to let the tests be helpful in development? How fast can you run a complete, green build for deploy? We’re talking about the first one in this essay. In development, you want to be able to run the tests you are writing and a subset of tests that are most likely to break based on your changes.

About, oh, eight or nine years ago, I decided I needed a personal website. On the theory that I didn’t want to become a full-time personal website wrangler, I decided to put the site on Squarespace. Squarespace was a great service, and a very well thought out set of tools but over time, it’s become less well suited for my (admittedly minimal) needs: Squarespace costs some money. When I started this site, it was at least theoretically a portal to self-published books.

Books That Made Me Happy 2019 Here’s big old book list for 2019. I did something very weird and nerdy this year. Rather than group the books by type, I just rank them. (I actually kind of rank them every year, but I don’t normally use the ranking in this post because I don’t want it to seem like a competition). To be extra nerdy, what I did this year was write a short program that randomly picked two books and asked me to compare them, and repeated that over and over, then did various math things to convert all those comparisons into a score and then a ranking.