By Sarah | August 31, 2009
Rails appears pretty strict about separation of the abstraction layers that make up its notion of a web application: models, view and controllers. If you were to suggest calling a presentation method, such as url_for, in your model, the stoic Rails advocate will have an allergic reaction. However, Rails thinks nothing of rendering a [...]
By Sarah | August 31, 2009
In preparation for teaching Ruby in a class with test first teaching. I decided to evaluate a few test frameworks. I thought initially to use Test::Unit, since it seemed easy to understand and ships with Rails. Wolfram Arnold argued that Test::Unit would burden the new folks with legacy. Alex Chaffee also [...]
By Sarah | August 16, 2009
In preparing to teach a new class, Ruby on Rails Fundamentals, I felt strongly that I wanted to teach test-driven development (TDD). Initially my motivation was that I found it hard to learn TDD when I learned Rails. I found little instructional material on the web and the variety of test frameworks was a bit [...]
By Sarah | August 15, 2009
I’ve been actively developing mobile applications using the new SmartPhone application framework from Rhomobile. I wrote an overview of the technology, but folks have asked for some more details. Below are some reflections from my development experience so far:
Rhodes
Rhodes is the client-side framework that Rhomobile offers. This is the key technology that abstracts the [...]
By Sarah | August 14, 2009
I’ll be teaching Ruby on Rails in a hands-on class in SF. In starts quite soon, on 8/25. It will be suitable for anyone who has attended one of the recent workshops or for anyone who is a programmer already but just doesn’t know Ruby or Rails. For folks who need to [...]
By Sarah | August 6, 2009
Being a woman in open source is “like walking into a sports bar on game night and wearing the wrong team’s jersey… it can be the friendliest group in the world and you will still feel a little awkward”
Kirrily Robert talks about two open source projects that have a majority of developers who are [...]
By Sarah | August 4, 2009
A rise in hacker love songs points to a positive sign for women in computing. What better way to feel like software engineering is hot than to hear about it in a clever, catchy tune?
Coder Girl “feels like my first ‘hello world’… her source is tight… sharper than most chicks you know”
Theory Girl “she doesn’t [...]
By Sarah | August 3, 2009
The August Ruby on Rails Outreach Workshop for Women was great success with 50 people attending including a few men who reached out to a woman to bring them along or came as a guest. We had a record turnout of over 20 volunteers, which made a huge difference to the workshop running smoothly. Sarah [...]