I have a number of rules of thumb that I use when doing TDD. One of them is to test only the essential aspects of the code I’m writing. I want to make sure that the key parts of my code work the way I want without over-constraining the rest. That way, my tests stay robust and don’t break as often when unrelated code changes.

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.