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.

It's important, however, that his wonderful code live on, and we need your help to do so. We've mirrored what repos we could find and contacted github tech support, who have promised assistance. Whymirror will do what it can to ease the transition but CANNOT be a long-term solution

Rio is a facade for most of the standard ruby classes that deal with I/O; providing a simple, intuitive, succinct interface to the functionality provided by IO, File, Dir, Pathname, FileUtils, Tempfile, StringIO, OpenURI and others. Rio also provides an application level interface which allows many common I/O idioms to be expressed succinctly.

View testing that doesn't suck.

A/Bingo is a Ruby on Rails A/B testing framework written as a plugin.

But trust me on the dynamic languages.

At times when the RightThing is difficult to ascertain and a lot of time has been spent without much progress, it may be better to do something rather than just enter AnalysisParalysis. The experience gained in the process often yields insight into what the RightThing may be.

UML is applying an abstraction at the wrong end of the problem. It is primarily used to sketch object models for inferior languages.

For all of my professed admiration of Ruby on rails, I personally don't think that easier and more productive CRUD application writing will shake things up. I personally care very much about writing applications in a tenth of the time, but using Rails is like listening to Jaco Pastorius. The real learning experience comes when you try to duplicate the feat.

The goal of modelling is to produce something substantially simpler than the world. This is achieved not through endlessly inventing new types and relationships -- in fact, it's just the opposite. It's by eliminating entities and restricting types that we get a model that's simpler than the world and thus useful.

You should endeavor to tell objects what you want them to do; do not ask them questions about their state, make a decision, and then tell them what to do.

In a recent post, Stephan Schmidt makes several suggestions in order to write "Next Generation Java". Unfortunately, I disagree with most of them

Even if you’ve trapped, you can change your programming style and reap some of the benefits of those new languages. In the last 15 years Java programming style has changed significantly.

By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.

As we get ready to upgrade our servers I thought it’d be a good time to upgrade our deployment process. Currently pushing out a new version of GitHub takes upwards of 15 minutes. Ouch. My goal: one minute deploys (excluding server restart time).