Concerns is a simple Rails plugin that provides you with a simple way to organise your Controllers, Models and Mailers, and split them into smaller chunks of logic. It is especially useful when you have lengthly models, and you get fed with having to scroll through several hundred lines of code.

Apple's random rules for iPhone app approval are a recipe for trivial apps and alienated developers

WTF GitHub??

validate( "email".is("required").andIsAn("email") );

Google Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer that embeds the entire Chrome web rendering engine inside IE.

Stop writing your own random string generators. Rails does this for you.

decided to go fixtureless with Shoulda + Factory Girl. All good, except one problem. Slow as fuck tests. So here’s fast_context as a solution for it. fast_context compiles all the ‘should’s within a context into a single test.

Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.

The idea behind scrooge is both surprisingly simple and powerful: instead of forcing the developer to manually specify each attribute column, simply observe and record for some period of time all of the attribute accesses and then reuse this knowledge in the future to automatically optimize your subsequent query requests.

All methods generated by string_attr_reader are now added to that new module instead of the class. The result is that when overriding those methods you can now call super because they’re are inherited from the new module.

Background allows you to add some context to the scenarios in a single feature. A Background is much like a scenario containing a number of steps. The difference is when it is run. The background is run before each of your scenarios but after any of your Before Hooks.

Passing the --profile flag to RSpec produces some additional output, namely the running times of the ten slowest examples in your specs.

On any page accessed with SSL, all Ajax requests must use SSL, or they will fail. To make this happen, all you need to do is include the names of the actions that service the requests in your ssl_required statement.

What if my controller decides to take the Thing.create! and rescue route? What if my model has a special initializer method, like Thing.build_with_foo? My spec for behavior should not fail if I change the implementation.

Pure-Ruby alternative to Cucumber.

Write declarative tests using nested contexts without performance penalties. Contest is less than 100 lines of code and gets the job done.

Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out.

What Is Bloat?

I brought up the question whether tests should call the translation API when checking for the presence of a string.