Last night I gave a talk at Geekup about RSpec and RSpec User Stories.  
 
Telling Stories With RSpec
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ruby rails)

 
Thanks to Ashley Moran for talking it through with me.
UPDATED to use Slideshare to display the slides.

Rails 2.2 deprecates the inbuilt Rails MySql driver and you are recommended to use the native MySql gem instead.
Unfortunately, when I tried to install this on my fresh Leopard box I got:
Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
Followed by a load of guff about options.
After a bit [...]

Two (related) thoughts on “The Specification is the Documentation“.
One of the things that I like to do, when developing, is to start with a sketch (you know, with 95g/m2 paper and a 6B pencil) of how the UI will look. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it helps communications with the client [...]

In a former life I used to write “functional specifications”. These were long, dense, hard-to-read documents that detailed what an application (not yet written) was supposed to do. I would spend (literally) weeks typing these things up, the customer would read it, think they understand and I would quote them based upon the document. [...]

One of the great advantages of using mock objects to test and specify your objects is that you concentrate solely on the thing you are testing.  
If you weren’t using mocks to tests that a controller re-shows the “new” form if given an invalid object, you would do post :create, :model => { … } where [...]

A very interesting article about how DRY you should be in your specs.  
http://lindsaar.net/2008/6/24/tip-24-being-clever-in-specs-is-for-dummies
Personally I agree with everything said.  Readability comes first, even at the expense of efficiency and DRY; “be nice to those who have to maintain the code”.  The really interesting thing though is the example is actually quite DRY - it’s more [...]

Sometimes, it’s worth stating the basics for all to see:

Follow the Model-View-Controller paradigm.  In particular, your views house your user-interface, your models handle the application and your controllers mediate between the two.  Controllers do not contain rules, conditionals dealing with business conditions, queries looking for objects related to the one in question.  All those things [...]

I’ve had this before so I should have learnt my lesson. But I didn’t.
I had a site, inherited from another developer, that was migrated to a new server.
The other developer sent me the images associated with the site and I dutifully copied them over. I took a look - lots of “missing [...]

Normally I wouldn’t talk about Ruby on Rails on this blog. That geek talk is found on the tech blog instead.
But, despite being about Rails, this isn’t a tech post. It’s about a problem that you will face when trying to hire a Rails developer.
Rails has a number of advantages.

It is a framework [...]

Weird one here.
I was working on some code that had controllers within a namespace (Admin::ThingyController). The controller descended from an Admin::BaseController. And Admin::BaseController included a module (include GenericStuff), which in turn was defined within the Admin namespace.
So far, so good.
The code-base was actually somebody elses and the time came for me to add [...]