Things Learned in 2008: TATFT

All right, so I didn’t exactly learn that testing all the fucking time is effing important over the last 12 months, it’s become clearer and clearer ever since I was first introduced to JUnit. But it did become crystal clear to me how important it really is. I’ve worked with a lot of legacy code, I’ve refactored a lot of it into more reasonable and manageable slices, and I’ve thrown a fresh set of tests at them. I swore at it, I cursed it, but in the end I was very satisfied with the result. The more code I worked with that wasn’t covered by a decent test suite the clearer the picture of always testing became to me.

Refactoring Rails Controllers

This post has been lying in my drafts folder for a while now, and since I’m trying out new approaches to shrink oversized controllers, it’s about time to put this out, and get ready for describing alternatives.

acts_as_solr is Dead, Long Live acts_as_solr

On a current project we recently switched from Ferret to using Solr as our search engine. That switch was more than necessary, but that’s material for a different blog post. Let’s just say, the switch was more than worth it, and Solr just rocks our socks off.

Vim - My College Sweetheart

It’s true, I did write my diploma thesis using Vim. Old-school with LaTeX and C++. When I came to the Mac five years ago I was still using the now pretty much dead Carbon version of MacVim. And well, it just didn’t feel right. I’m very comfortable on the command line, but on the Mac I wanted something that integrated well with the rest of that system, that behave like a real Mac application.