Is your own.

There are many ‘rules’ for programming and they have recently gained a renewed ‘following’ that expounds their virtues as things to strive for.

A minimal rack application, capable of being cloned from gist and deployed directly to heroku.

Just did the most common event to happen on my blog – I did another redesign :)

Question from 29th June 2012 on #rubyonrails. Why doesn’t the conditionally_include method execute any queries, while executing the send directly does?

I realised today that most of my contributions to the rails community come in the form of help on the #rubyonrails IRC channel, which frequently ends up with a gist. This gist ends up in my github account with then no real context in order to understand what formed the code there, leaving isolated snippets that are mostly useless.

Lee Hambley(@codebeaker) at MagRails asked this question in his talk “Grown-up Web Application Deployment” and commented that the Unix community seemed to have a sharp divide between people who are experts and people who were advanced beginners (or, from the Dreyfus Model, level 2 and level 5 people). As had been mentioned previously, the best teachers come from the ‘Level 3 – Competent’ range as these are the people who know what they are doing and, more importantly, know how they are doing it. Dreyfus is a skill-based approach, so a user can be level 2 in one skill and level 5 in another.

A question that frequently crops up with newcomers to various communities that encourage strong testing and test-first practices is “Why should I test?”. They are referring (hopefully) to the concept of writing automated tests that, on the surface, double the amount of code you’re writing. If they’re just referring to why should they bother to check that what they are doing works, compiles, does what they expect, and doesn’t fire a death-ray at the moon (unless they are working on moon-death-rays that is) then there is a much deeper problem.

One of the last implementation parts of the fishdelish project is a self-publishing mechanism. Having gotten to the start of this task, I realised that it needed some form of user identification. With the recent gawker security breach on my mind, I was very much in the mood for an external solution which led me to Omniauth and the latest branch of Devise which contains strategies for its use.

Well, I finally decided to get my site sorted out for the new year and the result is what you’re seeing in front of you.