Update: You might also want to check out reset_column_information. So a few days ago we started seeing the following errors on our Jenkins builds (swapped with fictional model and attribute names): NoMethodError: undefined method `attack_power=' for #<Ironman:0x00000008525d20> attack_power is a new attribute we recently added to the Ironman ActiveRecord model. I was baffled, as the table column is clearly there but ActiveRecord couldn’t see it. This weird behaviour is confirmed by ...

It was the first time I presented in front of 400+ people so I was really nervous - I blasted through the talk in under 30 minutes even though I was supposed to talk for 45 minutes, oh well. ;) video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/DeBsmdDmB9A Also, my slides are available too. P.S. If you’re located in China, you may view the talk at Railscasts China.

Update: Please check out this new interview with Matz, done by Engineer Type. A week ago I went to Shanghai, China to attend and to give a talk at RubyConf China. The day before the conference’s first day a bunch of us were invited to a VIP dinner where we met with Matz and got to play with a device running MRuby. And I heard that earlier on that day Matz was ‘adopted’ by a book publisher to do an interview. I have found the interview (in Chinese), and found it to be really useful. So I transla...

Contrary to what the title of the talk suggests, I am by no means a superstar developer myself. Though I would like to think that I am extremely passionate about what I do, therefore I love to share my thoughts and tips on web development and software engineering. Below is the version I used for my actual talk: https://speakerdeck.com/fredwu/2012-become-a-better-developer-you-can Since I had been preparing for my talk for over a month, I’ve done many revisions to my slides. Here’s an uncut ver...

I had such a wonderful time at RubyConf China! So here are some photos from the conference. :) Gallery of photos of yours truly on stage: [] Gallery of photos I took mostly on the VIP dinner event the day before the conference: []

The other day a colleague asked whether or not it’s possible to have SimpleCov return a group that only contains uncommitted changes. The answer is yes! After some digging around, we found the following way: # in spec_helper.rb SimpleCov.start 'rails' do add_group 'Changed' do |source_file| `git ls-files --exclude-standard --others \ && git diff --name-only \ && git diff --name-only --cached`.split("\n").detect do |filename| source_file.filena...

After a few nights of working on the 2.0 rewrite of jQuery Endless Scroll, I am now releasing one of the tools I built for the project: Skinny Coffee Machine. Skinny Coffee Machine is a simple JavaScript state machine written in CoffeeScript. It is fairly simple to use, with the flexibility of adding and removing observers for state transitions. Define State Machines @coffeeMachine.power = new SkinnyCoffeeMachine default: 'off' events: turnOn: off: 'on' ...

If you are like me who has no need for a full Xcode installation just to get the command line tools, chances are you are using one of these: Apple’s Command Line Tools or the osx-gcc-installer. Recently Node.js has made some changes so that it no longer installs on OS X via homebrew if you don’t have Xcode installed. If you run brew install nodejs, you will get the following error: \> Error: Failed executing: make install (node.rb:28) And if you run brew install -v nodejs, you will discov...

Don’t you just hate it when you have a fresh intall of Mountain Lion, RVM and some rubies - then all of a sudden you hit this OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError error message: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed The fix is quite simple actually, all you need to do is to download a CA root certificate: curl http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem -o ~/.rvm/usr/ssl/cert.pem And that’s it! Enjoy!

Like a lot of places, at Locomote we are building a platform that is API-based. As much as I like having comprehensive test suites, I often feel the need to manually test API endpoints to see exactly what the responses are. Tools such as Postman solves part of the issue: they allow us to quickly test API endpoints without messing with cURL. But as a lazy developer, I want more. ;) I want something that: - automatically generates API endpoints from Rails routes definition - defines input p...