Tammer Saleh

Changes

2009-04-28T18:52:09Z

I’ve worked in a few different types of environments in my career (academia, start-ups, Japan, doing good, working for the man, etc), but I can honestly say that I’ve never enjoyed my work, or my coworkers, as much as I have while I’ve been working with the team at Thoughtbot.

Thoughtbot understands the Ruby on Rails culture in a way that I’ve always respected. As a company, they focus on producing good work for both the clients and for the community. As a team, they foster an incredible amount of camaraderie and team spirit, without needing to stifle differences of opinion.

Setting out

All of this has made my recent decision to leave the company incredibly difficult. While Thoughtbot has been the best environment I could have hoped for, the need to set out on my own and build something for myself was just too strong.

I will be doing agile Ruby on Rails consulting for a few clients, and will soon focus on developing my own suite of products. While I’m currently fully committed, I’d be happy to discuss new opportunities and give referrals. I will also be posting my journey, and my development thoughts here, so stay tuned.

If you’re an incredible developer, and interested in living in the Boston or NYC areas, then I cannot recommend a better company to work for.

Vegas, Baby!

2009-04-22T16:32:51Z

I’ll be at RailsConf for the week of May 4th, so buy me a beer if you’re in town.

Here are some of the presentations I’m looking forward to in particular:

Don’t Mock Yourself Out by David Chelimsky
Discussion Panel: Women In Rails which will include two of my friends from hashrocket, Desi McAdam and Jacqui Maher
iPhone On Rails by Mike Clark (‘cause who’s not on the iPhone bandwagon these days?)
Blood, Sweat and Rails by Obie Fernandez – possibly the best business mind in our community.

And a quick shout out to my friend Eric Mill, from The Sunlight Foundation, who’s hosting the Open Government Hackathon. (And I think they’re still hiring, by the way.)

Introspection

2009-04-17T21:11:29Z

We give training classes at Thoughtbot, and one of the common issues I’ve seen is that there are many more examples of good ruby library code than there are of decent Ruby on Rails applications. A Rails application follows conventions and best practices that aren’t relevant to writing library code.

To that end, I’ve released the source to this blog on github.

Here be Dragons

I spent a little bit of time cleaning the code up, but here is the big disclaimer:

This is my playground. I try to keep the code somewhat clean, but I also experiment quite a bit. Not everything in here exemplifies best practices.

Domain Explosion

2009-04-15T03:12:31Z

There’s an AntiPattern that I still see in the wild far too often: the overly normalized domain. It’s easy to spot – you find over 50 files staring you down after opening the app/models directory in what should have been a basic Rails application.

A simple example is the following domain snippet, showing a Product model with all the trappings that surround it.

Each of Condition, Color, ProductState and ShippingType are separate models, with separate tables, separate factory definitions, unit tests, RESTful controllers, migrations, etc.

And each is responsible for a single name column.

That’s a lot of code. The more code I see in an application, the sorrier I feel for the client. Code is a liability. Like a pack mule, the development process becomes bogged down, cumbersome, and eventually comes to a halt due to an overburden of code.

A much simpler solution is to reduce each of those models into columns on Product, using validations and named scopes to give all the benefits of the domain above:


class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  COLORS = %w(Red White Blue)

  named_scope :colored, lambda {|c| {:conditions => {:color => c}}}
  validates_inclusion_of :color, :in => COLORS
end

Even the Photo model can be reimplemented this way, if you use the fantastic Paperclip plugin.

Developers, not coders.

It sounds absurd and even self defeating, but our job as developers isn’t to write code. Our job is to produce value for the client, and more often than not that means removing code.

That requires a whole lot of judgment, which translates to a whole lot of experience.

Behavior, not nouns.

The idea of removing classes in favor of values doesn’t fly in the face of good Object Oriented practices. The important distinction is that the classes above have essentially no behavior. A class without behavior is just a glorified value wrapped in maintenance costs.

Behavior, not vocabulary, dictates normalization. The moment you add a shipping_rate method to the Product model, you know you should migrate to a ShippingType class. The moment you have to be able to modify that price at runtime, you move to a model.

Simplest thing possible.

That’s the beauty of the BDD way. BDD teaches you to write your specs first, and produce the simplest thing possible in order to get them to pass. It also keeps you focused on producing business value for your client – something a domain explosion definitely doesn’t do.

The Plug

Chad Pytel and I delve into issues just like this in our upcoming Addison Wesley book, Rails AntiPatterns. Stay tuned for more information on the book, or for more posts like this.

Rockin' JAX with Hashrocket

2008-10-17T13:11:24Z

Hashrocket recently honored Joe Ferris (no relation) and I by an invitation to come down to Jacksonville Beach, Florida to work on one of their 321 Launch projects as guest star programmers.

Chris O’Sullivan actually did an amazingly accurate job of describing the project from a technical point of view by doing an impressively detailed analysis of our github commits and tweets.

We had a lot of things going for us in this project: The clients were a breeze to work with; Desi and Lark were both great developers, and a lot of fun to pair with; and the end product, Spot.us was going open-source – meaning there was no room for “cowboy antics” (Desi’s words).

The client was very impressed with the progress we had made, and with the overall polish of the site. You can read more about the reaction here, and the demo video is below.

Working at Hashrocket was a lot of fun, and in many ways was the perfect vacation. You’re surrounded by talented coders (which fends off the normal vacation boredom), and you get to wake up to beautiful beach views every morning.

Mememe

2008-10-03T20:30:30Z

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. (should be super-easy with Photobooth)
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with your picture.

(It’s “formal friday”)

Testing named_scope

2008-07-29T18:11:42Z

We’re huge fans of NamedScope here at Thoughtbot. It does wonders for finder reuse and clarity. Unfortunately, it also creates a large number of finders that all must be tested, where the old method may have only created one.

To help out with the testing of simple named_scope definitions, we added a helper to Shoulda, should_have_named_scope:


class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  named_scope :old,      :conditions => "age > 50"
  named_scope :eighteen, :conditions => { :age => 18 }
  named_scope :recent,   lambda {|count| { :limit => count } }
end

class UserTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  should_have_named_scope :old,       :conditions => "age > 50"
  should_have_named_scope :eighteen,  :conditions => { :age => 18 }
  should_have_named_scope 'recent(5)', :limit => 5
  should_have_named_scope 'recent(1)', :limit => 1
end

Now for complex methods, where the options returned by the has_finder are hairier than a simple limit or a single column condition, we would also write black box tests. But this helper is great for those simpler calls.

Quick vim svn blame snippet

2008-06-22T14:23:11Z

Just to prove the theory that every incredibly incomprehensible piece of code you come across is probably your own, I penned a quick svn blame vim command.


vmap gl :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p <CR>

Just highlight the disgusting code in question, and bask in your own shame!

Getting back into the swing of things.

2008-04-15T11:20:38Z

The past three weeks have been a total whirlwind of excitement, glamour, drinking, more glamour, sickness, boredom, and a bit more glamour.

I gave a presentation on BDD with shoulda for Mountain West Ruby Conf in Salt Lake City (video above).

It must be nice to live in a city completely surrounded by gorgeous snow capped mountains. And the library where the conference was held was an incredible example of architecture. Lots of sweeping curves and generous amounts of glass.

After that, it was off to present at Scotland on Rails. I’ve never been to a city as thoroughly beautiful as Edinburgh. It seemed like every street was lined with buildings older than my own country.

I’ll be putting the shots I took for both of these trips up on my flickr account as soon as I have time to unload them.

Unfortunately, I fell under the grips of a serious cold at the end of that trip, and just finished recovering last weekend. So now it’s time to get back up to speed.

I’ll be in New York next weekend for GoRuCo, Brisbane on the 9th for some personal time, San Diego on the 23rd for more of the same, Portland on the 29th for RailsConf, and Portland again in July for OSCON, where I’ll be giving a 3 hour tutorial on advanced ruby metaprogramming.

In fact, I’ve got so many trips planned this season, that I’ve started using Dopplr to keep track of them. Check out my profile and itinerary in the sidebar, stage left.

And I promise to get back to more technical posts as soon as the dust settles.

Email your Backpack GTD items

2008-03-20T07:01:17Z

Like most kids out there, I’m a follower of the GTD system. I’ve gone through a bunch of GTD software and have boiled it down to a combination of Backpack and a pad of paper in my hip pocket.

I thought I’d share a script I wrote that emails me my list of todo items every morning.

First off, my backpack GTD system is pretty straight forward:

A page for each context, the names of which start with ‘@’ – so @work, @phone, @online, @zipcar, @home, @blog, etc.
Each context page includes a single list named “Tasks”

That’s about it. I’ve also got a someday/maybe page, and a page for each major project, but those don’t get emailed to me.

Download this script, change the constants at the top, and plop it on a server somewhere. You should test it on the server it will live on by running /usr/local/bin/ruby /home/tsaleh/bin/email_todos.rb

Then setup your crontab to run that sucker every morning. My crontab looks like this:


@daily /usr/local/bin/ruby /home/tsaleh/bin/email_todos.rb

That should be it. The next morning you’ll get a list of the tasks you have to complete for each context.

Politiquotes - Who said what, when, and where

2008-03-07T09:39:36Z

I’d like to announce the launching of a small side project of mine:

Politiquotes

A political awareness app where you can post, vote on, and discuss quotes from your favorite candidates.

So join up and get your quote on!

Shoulda 4.0.1 - the lean and mean release

2008-03-04T08:31:16Z

Crossposted from GiantRobots

Shoulda is a great tool for cleaning up your tests, but there was always some
dirt under the hood that was keeping me up at night. I don’t want to just
move complexity around – I want to remove it entirely.

A recent change in edge rails forced me to get off my butt and do that.

So everyone give a warm hello to the latest Shoulda gem. It now uses a Context class in the backend, prints out should_eventually tests in a clear way, names the bare shouldas nicely, and fixes a few small bugs.

I also took the opportunity to fix some of the outstanding issues in the shoulda rails plugin (with a lot of great help from the community).

So grab the latest plugin and have some fun:


piston install https://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/shoulda/tags/rel-4.0.1 vendor/plugins/shoulda

Also, please let me know if you find any bugs or issues.

Upcoming conferences

2008-02-23T09:02:34Z

I’m totally psyched to say that I’ve been invited to speak at Scotland on Rails. I’ll be in the company of some truly amazing ruby developers, and I highly recommend that you reserve your ticket now. Who can resist a conference in site of an ancient scottish stronghold? Or, more to the point, who can resist the scotch?

I’ve also been invited to speak at the Mountain West Ruby conference alongside speakers like Philippe Hanrigou and Jeremy McAnally. There are a lot of talks at this one that I’m excited about seeing – especially the ones on Datamapper and CouchDB.

So if you’re at either of those conferences, then please drop by and say hi. And, yes, I’m just as fuzzy as my picture in real life.

Rails Rumours

2008-02-08T08:49:10Z

Topfunky founder discloses origins of company name: “I was high.” – Rails Rumours

Elephants

2008-02-04T15:42:47Z

Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards. Now imagine that it is your job, you lucky bastard, to be one of the little circus clowns standing alongside trying to make this extremely unnatural and unholy act take place. — Fake Steve on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo

Switchpipe

2008-02-01T19:12:14Z

SwitchPipe manages and forwards HTTP requests to Web application processes, automatically managing balancing, port numbers, monitoring and timeouts.

37 Signals introduces line breaks

2008-01-31T11:26:06Z

Linebreaks!

Job postings uses to be single paragraphs but now you can enter multiple paragraphs. We’ve also relaxed the 1000 character limit so you can post longer job ads if you’d like (although we believe concise, to-the-point job ads are more effective).

A couple of small, but totally useful plugins

2008-01-30T10:03:25Z

There are two plugins (well, one’s a gem) that I’ve been using lately which are so small that it seems silly to post about them.

…except for the fact that they’re incredibly useful.

disclaimer: these were written by friends of mine. In fact one of them was written by my boss, so this is nothing more than an obvious attempt to garner a raise.

mile_marker

We use this at thoughtbot to manage client expectations, but I use it for my own sites to visually remind myself when I haven’t completed part of a page.

Quiet Backtrace

Install this gem, configure it in your test_helper.rb, and watch as your failure backtraces shrink to just the information you need. If you’re following BDD, and trying to achieve 1 assertion per test, then this really helps unclutter your failures.

Rescuing Net::HTTP exceptions

2008-01-29T20:19:14Z

Working with Net::HTTP can be a pain. It’s got about 40 different ways to do any one task, and about 50 exceptions it can throw.

Just for the love of google, here’s what I’ve got for the “right way” of catching any exception that Net::HTTP can throw at you:


begin
  response = Net::HTTP.post_form(...) # or any Net::HTTP call
rescue Timeout::Error, Errno::EINVAL, Errno::ECONNRESET, EOFError,
       Net::HTTPBadResponse, Net::HTTPHeaderSyntaxError, Net::ProtocolError => e
  ...
end

Why not just rescue Exception => e? That’s a bad habit to get into, as it hides any problems in your actual code (like SyntaxErrors, whiny nils, etc). Of course, this would all be much easier if the possible errors had a common ancestor.

The issues I’ve been seeing in dealing with Net::HTTP have made me wonder if it wouldn’t be worth it to write a new HTTP client library. One that was easier to mock out in tests, and didn’t have all these ugly little facets.

Comment below if you know of more exceptions it should catch, or of an easier way to get this done.

Shoulda in Advanced Rails Recipes

2007-12-11T01:32:00Z

Cross posted from Giant Robots

Mike Clark and the Pragmatic Programmers just released the beta version of their latest offering: Advanced Rails Recipes: 72 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps. This is one of the few rails books I’ve been eagerly waiting for, so you can imagine how honored I was when Mike Clark asked me to review his section on Shoulda.

That’s right, folks! Shoulda got its own stake of land in recipe #22: “Getting Started with BDD.”

So head on over and grab the combo pack. You get the beta PDF now (’cause none of us respect delayed gratification) and the print book when it ships – all for around $40.