I have an appreciation for FactoryGirl and its syntactic sugar. Having said that, I dislike how easy it is to create entire object graphs. Yes. That statement even feels weird to me as a write it. I dislike how easy something is. Bear with me. Write unit tests first. Not integration tests. When setting up mocks and … More Unit Tests: Don’t You Forget About Me
Nothing is so common as the wish to be remarkable. -Oliver Wendell Holmes This was one of the opening quotes of the book Remarkable! by Randy Ross and David Saylers. And what a way to draw me in as a reader. I want to be remarkable. Often I have felt some guilt for this desire–as … More Learning from those who are remarkable
If you’re looking to upgrade Postgres locally in a Rails project, it’s straight-forward-yet-not-simple. It’s not a one-click/one-command operation. I used the pg_dump command, along with Homebrew in this example. I have also seen a good post from Christopher Brown and Keita on manually backing up and copying data files using pg_upgrade. These involve a few more steps … More Upgrading Postgres in a Rails codebase
I came across mRemoteNG (a free SSH client) a couple of weeks ago, and I personally like it much more than PuTTY/KiTTY for SSH. Mostly I prefer the UX of configuration a connection far more than PuTTY. You can also store your username/password with encryption in the app. There are a few other niceties, such as … More mRemoteNG – a friendly alternative to PuTTY
Developing via command line is a love-hate thing for us as developers. And a bit of a holy war. And it contains other holy wars inside, such as vi vs. emacs. But I digress. Regardless of your reason to develop via command line, UNIX is likely where we’ll do it. A few definitions Shell: Your … More Getting started in UNIX
Whoa?! I started typing and then my cursor jumped all over the place. When I first opened something in Vim, I just started typing. And that was frustrating. I couldn’t figure out how to move the cursor, start typing, stop typing, or just quit the darn thing. This is very common with UNIX text editors, … More Getting Started in Vim
I initially felt that a few things in Vim are just…meh. I want my tabs to take up 4 spaces instead of 9. I want syntax highlighting for LESS or TypeScript. There are better ways, right? You can customize Vim by creating a .vimrc file in your home directory. vim ~/.vimrc Tab Settings Quick primer: … More Tricks with Vim
Hello, NuGet I find NuGet to be pretty awesome. Even though it’s several years old, it still has that new car smell to me. We recently started using the NuGet Package Restore feature, which has helped improve our CI builds. But like leather bucketseats, the feature I’ve wanted to have for a few years is … More Creating Your Own NuGet Package, Part 1
Automagically Using NuGet with a Project Want to automate things even more? For this example, find a Class Library project that you like. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder where the .csproj file for that project is. nuget spec Bam. Now you have a .nuspec file created automatigically. You’ll notice some strings … More Creating Your Own NuGet Package, Part 2
If you use NuGet package sources, you will need to add a new package source to your preferences in Visual Studio. In VS 2012 and 2013, this is under Tools –> Options –> Library Package Manager –> Package Manager Settings –> Package Sources). If you want to try out a cool new trick: Ctrl + Q package sources … More Adding other NuGet Package Sources in Visual Studio
undeniablyrob 