Long Time, No Blog

It seems to work out that when I’m most busy coding, I have the least time to blog (and vice-versa). That’s my official excuse for it being two months since my last update: work has been busy.

First, at the beginning of October, me and the Kashless Krew went to AlohaOnRails, my first Ruby/Rails conference in sunny (read: “sweltering”) O’ahu, Hawai’i:

The conference was a lot of fun: got to hear about some neat Rails tech and meet some of the rock stars in the Ruby world.

I’ve also been continuing my exploration of No-SQL databases. While I still love the design of CouchDB, I’ve been playing with MongoDB and MongoMapper. Mongo is a bit more mature, even if it does still have a whiff of the SQL smell about it. I’ll have more Useful Information about that later.

The other thing I’ve been learning is the RSpec testing framework. When I first looked into it a few years back, I found the RSpec syntax unwieldy compared with Test::Unit. But after having to do various hacky things to make Shoulda run decently (e.g. fast_context) and even contemplating writing my own framework (the now defunct Mustard), I’ve come to appreciate the RSpec Way and can’t see myself ever going back.

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