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.

The same problem happened with address, which was specified to mean only the contact information for the author of a page. It was quite explicitly specified to not accept mailing addresses. Of course, tons of people did just that, because they had an address and there was an address element, so of course they went together!

Recently I've been made aware of people inside US Government organizations using my Ruby on Rails Security presentation as an excuse to limit Ruby on Rails adoption and projects inside those organizations.

Another ActiveModel alternative.

Celerity is a JRuby wrapper around HtmlUnit – a headless Java browser with JavaScript support. It provides a simple API for programmatic navigation through web applications. Celerity aims at being API compatible with Watir.

You want to try out all of the different ruby interpreters and versions including different patchlevels, but you don't want to break what's working for you now. No time to waste?

Understand API usage.