A common idiom in ruby is to call a method only if its receiver is not nil:
thing.foo if thing
or:
thing && thing.foo
Various libraries exist for making this a little more convenient. You can use andand, or if you are using Facets you can use ergo. And seriously, you should be using them – they […]
When spec-ing something that calls method which takes a set of nested hashes (as many Rails methods do), it may be tempting to use #hash_including to test for only the values you care about. However #hash_including won’t work the way we might hope for nested hashes. Take the following (highly contrived) example:
describe CoffeeMaker […]
Periodically the question of how to test private methods comes up at work or online. My answer is: don’t. It may seem trite, but there is some reasoning behind it.
Private methods are, by definition, implementation details. If you are approaching your tests from a behavioral standpoint – and you really should be, […]
I’ve fallen off the wagon of late in learning “a language a year” (as The Pragmatic Programmer advises). I have a long list of languages to learn, but I thought I’d try and narrow it down to a top five. Here goes:
Io – the more I work in OO the more I am […]
I hope to see some of you at Ruby DCamp this weekend!
People keep telling me that GitHub is the “killer app” of git. Perhaps they meant “productivity killer”?
I submit to you that if your distributed version control workflow has a single point of failure that can bring your work to a crashing halt, you haven’t grokked distributed version control.
I’ve been watching with some concern as […]