Category Archives: Productivity

Building Sample Apps in Ruby, NodeJS and PHP

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Derick Bailey

In the last three years I’ve gone from full time .NET development to full time Ruby on Rails and then full time JavaScript. It’s been an awesome ride, so far, but it’s not done yet. I started digging in to … Continue reading →

Also posted in Community, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby | 28 Comments

A WinJS SpecRunner: Automating Script Tag Insertion For Unit Tests

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Derick Bailey

Writing unit tests with Mocha or Jasmine is generally pretty easy. Once you have a test runner set up, it’s not much different than any other JavaScript environment, really. But the trick to this is getting a test runner set … Continue reading →

Also posted in Jasmine, Javascript, MochaJS, Test Automation, Unit Testing, WinJS | 3 Comments

What’s your favorite part of software development, and why?

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Derick Bailey

I love solving problems and making the lives and/or jobs of others easier. I have a natural fascination with puzzles, electronics and tools combined with a deep seeded need to create and combine things in different ways. This is part … Continue reading →

Also posted in Analysis and Design, Domain Driven Design, Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter | 5 Comments

A Semi-Intelligent Watchr Script For Rails And RSpec

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Derick Bailey

I’m using Watchr in my current Rails 3 project, instead of Autotest, to run my Cucumber and RSpec tests whenever I save a file. It makes life so much easier than having to manually run them. Yesterday, I decided to … Continue reading →

Also posted in RSpec, Ruby, Smoke Test, Test Automation, Testing, Unit Testing | 2 Comments

An Observation Of Pair Programming vs. Not

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Derick Bailey

I’ve spent the better part of the last month doing remote pair programming with Joey Beninghove, on our current contract. It’s been great – the constant discussion, the driving out of features, one small step at a time, the realizations … Continue reading →

Also posted in Agile, Analysis and Design, Continuous Improvement, Quality | 42 Comments

Web Development Stack In OSX

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Derick Bailey

It has been almost a month since I ventured out into contracting and took up OSX on a Macbook Pro as my primary operating system. In that time, I’ve been very fortunate to have Joey Beninghove guide me through the … Continue reading →

Also posted in Behavior Driven Development, Command Line, Git, RSpec, Ruby, Source Control, Test Automation, Testing, Tools and Vendors, Unit Testing, Vim | 7 Comments

Cost vs. Risk In Testing

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Derick Bailey

There was a bit of interesting discussion on twitter this morning, concerning the cost of test-first vs. risk. Here’s the visual version of what I’m saying: The premise behind the value of test-first is that we will wash out (or … Continue reading →

Also posted in Analysis and Design, Pragmatism, Quality, Risk Management, Testing | 12 Comments

A Few Thoughts On IoC, An Idea For A different Type Of Container, And A Lot Of Questions

Posted on September 14, 2010 by Derick Bailey

With all the comments on my previous post, there actually is a lot of great insight to be had. I’ve picked up on a few underlying themes and several of the commenters were able to cut through the cruft of … Continue reading →

Also posted in .NET, C#, Compact Framework, Pragmatism, Quality | 28 Comments

Vim+Grep: Find All Occurrences Of Text In Your Project

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Derick Bailey

I’m in the middle of some sweeping changes in albacore – changing the .path_to_command property to .command for all of the tasks that run an external tool. The core of the change is easy. I have a RunCommand module that … Continue reading →

Also posted in Albacore, Ruby, Smoke Test, Vim | 7 Comments

ZenTest+Autospec Is An RSpec TDDer’s Best Friend

Posted on May 3, 2010 by Derick Bailey

In all the time that I’ve been using RSpec (almost a year now), I never knew about the zentest or autospec tools until I was recently watching a code kata that was using Ruby and RSpec. … so, now I … Continue reading →

Also posted in Albacore, Behavior Driven Development, Command Line, Continuous Integration, Rake, RSpec, Ruby, Unit Testing, Vim | 3 Comments