In object-oriented languages, objects consist of a mix of state and behavior. The state is stored in what are variously called attributes, properties, instance variables, or member variables. The behavior is accessed through methods or member functions.

I’ve never considered myself an idea person or big thinker. I feel that I’m much better at iterating on ideas that are already laid out, making them stronger. I’ll often be able to take a few steps back and see a bigger picture, but even there I feel stronger at the tactical level than the strategic level.

I was recently working on a Rails project where we needed to represent a hierarchical (tree-like) data structure in the database. We had chosen the Ancestry Ruby gem to help us.

Teaching computers to play games has been a pursuit and passion for many programmers. Game playing has led to many advances in computing over the years, and the best computerized game players have gained a lot of attention from the general public (think Deep Blue and Watson).

I recently had the honor of attending and speaking at LoneStar Ruby Conference. This year, it was a one-day conference on a Saturday.

This is my 150th post on this blog. I started posting here a little over two-and-a-half years ago (first post was Jan. 16, 2013), and have since been keeping up a weekly posting schedule with a couple of short holiday/vacation breaks.

I’m not much of a green thumb, but I do know that plants occasionally need to be repotted.

This is the final post in a series about Unit Testing.

This post is part of an ongoing series about Unit Testing.

This post is part of an ongoing series about Unit Testing.