1. Extending your testing strategy beyond go-live

    In a recent post on his software testing blog, Eric Jacobsen talks about responding to bugs which ‘escape’ into production: The point of Citrulu is to enable you to go one better: by allowing you to monitor your website in a test-driven way (rather than simply looking for exceptions or timeouts), it blurs the distinction between […]

  2. RSpec FAIL – Testing Rails ‘destroy’

    I’m writing some specs for Citrulu and was scratching my head about this one for a while: When writing specs for Controllers, some http methods accept a hash as an input: it “assigns the requested test_file as @test_file” do controller.stub(:check_ownership!) get :edit, {:id => @test_file.to_param} assigns(:test_file).should eq(@test_file) end However with delete, this doesn’t work – the following […]

  3. Caching with Varnish on Heroku (Rails)

    I had some trouble with a personal Rails project – trying to get it to use Varnish caching. I’ve collected my learnings on my personal blog.

  4. Permanent fix for Rails’ wretched deprecation warning

    Developing rails apps under Ubuntu means that we get a lot of these warnings: DEPRECATION WARNING: require “activerecord” is deprecated and will be removed in Rails 3. Use require “active_record” instead. (called from at /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/activerecord.rb:2) Recently, we added a cron job to an app which meant that we were getting emailed this error every hour, […]

  5. Disable your caps lock in Ubuntu

    I hate the caps lock: it seems to exist just to give me strings of shouty text and to confuse vim. Normally, I just pop it off my keyboard. But I just got a nice new Das Keyboard professional, and I didn’t want to mutilate it. I had a quick Google and found lots of […]

  6. Barclays Bikes gem

    Harry Marr (GoCardless) has made barclays_bikes: a cool little gem that scrapes the Barclays Cycle Hire website and gives you a command line interface to get the number of bikes and free spaces available at each docking station. For example, $ bbikes Gives the full list of London’s docking stations and $ bbikes Borough Gives you […]