Testing logging in Ruby with StringIO

Sometimes logging in your application is meaningful enough that you want to test it. For example, we often use logs as a lightweight alerting mechanism by feeding them into loggly.

How we switched elasticsearch clusters without anybody noticing

We’ve been stuck on an old (0.90) version of elasticsearch for some time now, looking for a way to upgrade to 1.3 so we can get all the benefits of the scalable percolator and other fun features. We’ve recently been…

Getting Started Programming Light Table

Creating a File

LightTable’s behavioral innards are written almost exclusively in ClojureScript. So if we want to start poking at them, the first thing we need to do is create a .cljs file. I’m calling mine “understanding…

Private Methods and Properties in Swift

Apple announced a new language last week: Swift. Now that everyone’s had time to read the book and start playing with sample projects, a startling deficiency of the language has been uncovered. Swift makes no provision for access modifiers such as public…

Scalable code without bloat: DCI, Use Cases, and You

My world is that of startups.

I’ve been working at early stage companies or starting them for almost fifteen years now. So my worldview is a bit colored by the needs of startups, but I submit that these needs…

Sublayouts in Rails in 3 easy steps

Let’s say your app has a special area such as a dashboard which has its own layout, but you still want to inherit everything the parent layout has, such as the header and footer.

Grep-able code is changeable code

One of the downsides of using a dynamically typed language like Ruby is that it’s sometimes difficult to find exactly where certain classes are being used in your codebase. Take the following trivial model and controller example:

How to build a startup that learns quickly

Author: Nicholas Evans

I’m a framework geek. I love it when someone takes complex ideas and distills them into simple, visual structure. So when Eric Ries’s Lean Startup book came out a couple years ago, packed to the gills with…

Apprentice Challenges: Code Concepts and Standards

Two weeks ago I outlined a number of challenges faced by apprentice (or other first-time) developers. The very first of these hurdles is new concepts and code standards, my description of which is below:

11 Principles for Startup Design Teams

Guiding principles that help the Reverb.com design team turn it up to 11.

1. Get An Outside Perspective Early & Often