I was recently working on some unfamiliar code and ran across a confusing bug. I’ve changed the names and nature of the code below, but the essence of the bug remains.

When I was at Rogue Rails last month, our team was working on a story-tracking application. At one point, we had a pair of Cucumber specs that looked like this:

I see a worrying trend developing in the software industry.

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

On a recent episode of the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, Ben Orenstein said that when you’re learning something new, you should write the blog post you wish you could have read. This is one of those blog posts.

This past week, I had the pleasure of attending the first ever Rogue Rails workshop and conference. As an added bonus, the event was held in the city where I live, which almost never happens. I live in a smaller city with a small but growing tech community, so it was really nice to have an event like this.

There’s been a lot of discussion about distributed teams and remote work lately. Earlier this year, there was a huge debate when Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer decided to ban telecommuting.

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

I recently attended my first Ruby DCamp. I’d heard good things about the event from talking with Evan Light (the organizer), hearing Avdi Grimm talk about it on the Ruby Rogues podcast, and from reading Brandon Hays’ post about last year’s event.

Many times in Ruby, it is useful to allow the creator of an object to configure it using a block. This is especially true when writing a domain-specific language (DSL).