“Confident Ruby” now in Beta!

Hey, remember when I said I’d finish Confident Ruby by September 1, 2012? Ha ha! That was a funny joke! Seriously though, this book has taken much longer than intended, partly as the scope grew, but mostly because of other … Continue reading

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RubyTapas 100th Episode Giveaway

On May 22, the 100th episode of RubyTapas will arrive in subscribers’ inboxes and RSS readers, and I’m marking the occasion with a great big giveaway! I’ve got a whole pile of eBooks and other goodies to give out. Check … Continue reading

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RubyTapas Freebie: The End of Mocking

RubyTapas 050 Capture

At the borders of our systems, mockist testing hits a point of diminishing returns. In this free episode we take a look at when to stop mocking and start integration testing.

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RubyTapas Freebie: Utility Function

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Some functions are useful in many different contexts. In this free episode we’ll explore some ways to make them available both to library code and to client code of a library.

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RubyTapas Freebie: Gem Love Part 2

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I have a few ongoing miniseries in RubyTapas. In this, the second installment of a miniseries chronicling the creation of a Rubygems plugin and an associated server, I touch on a number of topics including acceptance testing, the shellwords standard … Continue reading

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RubyTapas Freebie: Hash Default Value

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Today’s cautionary episode demonstrates and explains a Hash gotcha that often comes as a surprise.

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RubyTapas Freebie: Streaming

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Does code optimized for RAM usage need to be ugly? Find out, in this free episode of RubyTapas.

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RubyTapas Freebie: Scanning a String

RubyTapas Episode 041 Screencap
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RubyTapas Freebie: Caller-Specified Fallback Handler

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Sometimes it’s hard to decide how to handle a failure in a method call. Raise an exception? Return a nil? Log an error? The best choice may differ depending on where the method is being called. In today’s free RubyTapas … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, RubyTapas Samples, Screencasts | 2 Comments

Taking a break from pair programming

About seven months ago I officially put out my shingle as a consulting pair-programmer. Since then I’ve logged around 250 hours of pair programming with at least 60 different programming partners. Most of that was paid sessions, but I also … Continue reading

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