Author Archives: David Sulc

Initializing the test database before a Cucumber session (in Rails)

Posted on August 7, 2011 by David Sulc

In one of my side projects, I needed some setup data to be present in the test database before each Cucumber session. Since this took me a few moments to get right, I figured I’d document it here.

Posted in Rails, Ruby | 4 Comments

The value of Behavior-Driver Development and cohorts

Posted on July 24, 2011 by David Sulc

Plenty has been written on the merits of BDD, TDD, and friends. However, I’ll address them from a different angle: in previous posts, I argued that programming languages were remarkably similar to natural languages, and a later post suggested you … Continue reading →

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Focus on outcomes

Posted on July 17, 2011 by David Sulc

In everything I do, I try to keep the goal in mind. Focusing on the outcome now comes quite naturally to me, but I’ve noticed that what I now take for granted, others seem completely oblivious to. And this goal-oriented … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture | Comments Off on Focus on outcomes

Cucumber tweaks

Posted on July 10, 2011 by David Sulc

I’ve lately started to use Cucumber and Selenium (via Capybara) “for real” to be used as the testing mechanism on my latest Rails project. In fact, I’ve been relying on it quite heavily to test views : I skipped the … Continue reading →

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On programming fluency (cont’d)

Posted on July 3, 2011 by David Sulc

In the previous post, I covered how I consider programming languages to be similar to (foreign) natural languages, and how one can go about learning the basics. We’ll now move on to how a coder can build on this initial … Continue reading →

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On programming fluency

Posted on June 26, 2011 by David Sulc

Over on Slashdot, a discussion on programming prompted me to organize various thoughts I’ve had on programming. Having acquired several languages as a child (i.e. effortlessly) and going on to learn other languages (both natural and programming languages) as a … Continue reading →

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Leveraging Active Record reflections

Posted on June 19, 2011 by David Sulc

I recently ran into an issue using the permanent records gem: when you permanently destroy a record (i.e. NOT soft delete), the dependent records with a `:dependent => :destroy` relationship are only soft deleted (i.e. marked as deleted, but kept … Continue reading →

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Learning Rails 3

Posted on June 12, 2011 by David Sulc

Update: I have since been able to review the first edition (with complete content). The Rails 3 framework has brought quite a lot of new, sexy features which in turn has prompted many people to learn to use the framework. … Continue reading →

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Impostor syndrome and BOMTYCC problems

Posted on June 5, 2011 by David Sulc

This post will be my attempt at describing how I keep on pushing myself to improve my skills and go beyond performance plateaus, despite struggling with impostor syndrome.

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Data wrangling and Ruby metaprogramming

Posted on May 29, 2011 by David Sulc

I needed to combine customer data from 2 separate sources (a homebrew warehouse and CRM) and output a report. Given I’d be dealing with similar objects with overlapping attributes, it would be really easy to make a gigantic mess with … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Ruby, SugarCRM Ruby gem | Comments Off on Data wrangling and Ruby metaprogramming