I just watched Mike Monteiro’s recent talk “F*ck you. Pay me.” which has a lot of great advice about how to get make sure you get paid for your work when doing service work for clients. It was targeted at designers, but it rings true for development as well. His talk focused around [...]
At last week’s WCA panel, Jeff Haynie, CEO and founder of Appcelerator, suggested that mobile frameworks will continue to gain traction because of the rise in complexity of mobile applications. Mobile applications are becoming context-aware. They know who you are, where you are — the physical sensors are augmented by the potential for this personal [...]
I am happy to announce that our next series of classes at Blazing Cloud are starting soon!
We will be offering an evening Javascript for Programmers class from May 25th to June 30th, which is targeted toward web developers who have been coding with another language and would like to learn Javascript. This class is taught [...]
$ rake spec
(in /Users/sarah/src/../my_app)
You have 1 pending migrations:
20110416135407 CreateCourses
The rake spec command reminds us that we need to run our migration before running
our tests. In fact, it does a whole lot more than that. There are a whole bunch of best practices rolled in that one
command. To see exactly what is going on, [...]
By Sarah | April 17, 2011
I’m excited to be moderating a WCA Mobile SIG panel on May 10th in San Jose. On the panel will be leaders of the top cross-platform mobile frameworks, Rhomobile (Rhodes), Nitobi (PhoneGap) and Appcelerator (Titanium) along with the relative newcomer AppMakr.
Walk-Ins are welcome if there’s space, but I would advise reserving your spot ahead of [...]
REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) is a great way to learn. With Ruby, the experience is enabled with irb. Sometimes, to do this we need to peek into the innards of things, which I find to be an extremely effective way to explain mocks and stubs. It’s a regular part of my Ruby curriculum, even [...]
There was some discussion, if you can call it that, on twitter yesterday about the proliferation of RSpec and Cucumber, over Test::Unit. I don’t believe that Twitter is an effective medium for well-reasoned debate. I do believe that it is worth discussing why we like one technology over another, so we can learn from each [...]
By Sarah | February 15, 2011
I spent a little time working on some tests for a legacy web app that we plan to re-write in Ruby. Before the big re-write, I thought it would be wise to write some integration tests to call the app via http and verify responses. I wanted to use vanilla http and not [...]
By Sarah | January 30, 2011
Last week’s distance learning experiment was a success! We had a few technical glitches… I forgot to hit the “record” button at the beginning and after the break and didn’t set the meeting time to last the whole session, so I’ll be repeating the class today at 4pm PST. The Blazing Cloud blog [...]
By Sarah | January 24, 2011
Tomorrow night we’re planning an experiment in distance learning. If it works out, we’ll offer our evening Blazing Cloud classes with a (for pay) online option, but for starters we thought we would try out the tech. If you want to join us at 6:30pm for an introduction to Ruby on Rails, please [...]