This utility works extremely well in Agile environments where there is design work done upfront. I use it extensively and clients really appreciate the ability to see what’s done and not done in a new application.

In this update:

• improved namespacing – no more collisions. To update, your function calls must be of the form $.under_construction.<function name>
• improved opacity – Due to some functions that were recently made available in the latest versions of jQuery, I was able to restructure the overlay so you get a cleaner look over darker backgrounds.

See the demo for more details.

In the future, I’m hoping to add iteration/sprint labels to the overlays so the client or stakeholder can see at what point the feature is going to be built.

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

Having worked with Jon, and after reading his articles at A List Apart, I can say it will be an interesting and informative talk. Working with Jon and Hot Knife Design has been a great experience. He brings great creative leadership to virtual teams.

For further details, refer to the NEWDA site

The slides are below.

Evan’s blog post with the benchmarks can be found here. There are links to other benchmarks and details.

The process library I alluded to is called God.

Other links

• Thinking Sphinx
• Sphinx
• Delayed Job (for delta indexing)
• Workling Delta Indexer
• Workling
• Starling
• Pat Allen

Let me know what you thought of the talk and the slides. I hope you found it helpful!

I wrote an article about my switch from RSpec to Shoulda. A lot of issues I discussed have been addressed by both teams. Please participate in the discussion about the latest development in test frameworks.

I think it’s really cool that Rails now has a publication. Props to Olimpiu for putting it together.

We had 5 minutes to get our points across. It was challenging but fun. It was a great event and there were lots of other great talks.

The slides are below.

To place further emphasis on the message – communication is a vital part of every project. We’ve inherited so many projects going wrong just because people aren’t being honest and open with each other. Communicate to educate, define norms, and demonstrate progress. These are not nice to haves in your projects – they’re requirements.

Do you have a project that needs rescuing? Contact us so that we can make your software idea a reality.

View the Demo

I wanted something that it is entirely unobtrusive and W3C compliant. No funky markup, and when you build a feature, you just remove the pending class from the elements you want to expose.

I’m planning to add more features. It would be great to add labels to the overlays so the stakeholder will know when that feature will be unveiled like Thoughtbot’s Mile Marker. I’m planning to implement that as another class. Of course, the design principal of staying unobtrusive and standards compliant will remain paramount.

Thanks to a great framework like JQuery, building this was a snap. I recommend using it in conjunction with jQuery Hotkeys

ActionView::TestCase does not initialize current url so you won’t be able to use *_url and *_path helpers generated from your routes. Put the following lines at the end of your test_helper.rb file to resolve the issue.

class ActionView::TestCase < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  class TestController < ActionController::Base
    attr_accessor :request, :response, :params

    def initialize
      @request = ActionController::TestRequest.new
      @response = ActionController::TestResponse.new
      
      #TestCase doesn't have context of a current url so cheat a bit
      @params = {}
      send(:initialize_current_url)
    end
  end
end

I've submitted a patch to core regarding this. Please +1 for the good of helper_tests!

Thanks to Chad Myers for his simple intro to qUnit – I will definitely be trying it out in a few of my projects.

It was a snap to configure and has a simple plugin you can download once you register. You can add hooks to Lighthouse or other bug tracking software. Not sure how to do this yet, but it’s awesome to see a great execution on an app that solves a problem.