Category Archives: productivity

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →