I’ve recently been working on a pull request for Rake and I’ve run into some problems I don’t know how to solve, so I’m asking for some help.

I’m pretty new to CoffeeScript/JavaScript.

In my previous post, I talked about abstract methods. In that post, I mentioned that Smalltalk’s convention for abstract methods is to use ^self subclassResponsibility in the body of the abstract method.

When building inheritance hierarchies in object-oriented languages, it is often desirable to have methods that are not implemented by the base class but only by the leaf-level classes in the hierarchy. A common case is when using the Template Method pattern.

A good design communicates the intended use of the object. In the physical world, this communication is accomplished by “affordances” as discussed by Donald Norman in “The Psychology of Everyday Things”.

Short answer: Sometimes.

The Ruby on Rails framework has a lot of magic in it that automatically takes care of tedious tasks so that the developer no longer has to worry about it.

In larger Rails applications, it is common to move related models, controllers, and/or views into sub-directories. Once moved, those classes will no longer be automatically found by Rails’ autoloader. There are two solutions:

At my new job, I’m working on a project that uses some different processes than the project I was on at my last job. I’m finding the differences interesting, and have been thinking about the forces that would push a team in one direction or another.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending my first RubyConf. I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of great talks, and I got to meet with many friends (new and old). I went with a group from Zeal, my new employer, which was an interesting change. In the past, there might have only been one other person from work with me at a conference.