Noel Rappin Writes Here

I’m going to have an official WindyCityRails conference report up on the Obtiva blog shortly. Consider this the more self-indulgent conference round-up. Ray Hightower and the rest of the team put on a great show, everything ran smoothly, and even the typical complaints about WiFi were kind of muted. When I’m at a conference, I tend to use Twitter as my notebook. People seem to appreciate it, it’s nice to get quotable lines out into the community, and it gives me an excuse to monitor the Twitter backchannel.

I’ve got a bunch of half-written posts, none of which you’ll see today since I’ve been spending all my time getting ready for WindyCityRails tomorrow. So, some quick hits and things to mention before I forget… Beta 7 of Rails Test Prescriptions came out earlier this week. The big addition is the chapter on RSpec. I’m happy with how this one came out. And now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, with only one or two chapters left to write.

Book Status RSpec chapter draft handed in to edit. It’s going to need a better conclusion. A lot changed in this one, relative to the Lulu version – this is probably the chapter most affected by my own personal experience since it’s original version. Links Haven’t done a link set in a while, this is going to be kind of random. Still seats available for both WindyCityRails in general, and for my tutorial in specific.

Book Status Shoulda chapter fixes made. The next decision is whether to push that as a beta by itself, or wait until the RSpec chapter is also done. Also Today is the last day to get early bird pricing for WindyCityRails. Book Status I did not know that Ruby 1.9 had its own coverage tool. Aaron Patterson shows how to use that tool and a little code to create useful output for coverage testing.

Book Status The Shoulda chapter is draft complete, after a slight restructuring to change the emphasis of the chapter, and a lot of syntax changes. My previous version of the chapter was written before Shoulda went in the direction of RSpec compatibility and so there were a lot of syntax changes that needed to be made, particularly to the way you create Shoulda extensions, which used to be much simpler.

Book Satus Still patching the Shoulda chapter together. Realized yesterday that Machinist is in the middle of a version 2 upgrade, which, along with some factory_girl changes probably means I have some tweaking to do in that chapter. I haven’t run the buy links in a while. You can get the beta ebook and pre-order from Pragmatic and the book is also available from Amazon. WindyCityRails Early Bird pricing for WindyCityRails is scheduled to end today.