“Showing up on time …with a smile on your face is almost always more important than what you actually say or do.” —Seth Godin

overhead here.

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…overheard on an internal forum…

“My my passion for nifty server tricks will blow peoples minds” —Daniel Johnson

Okay, this is a little overdue… but better late than never! ;-)

We’ve had several new people start with PLANET ARGON over the past few months. Some of them are blogging about their experience of working with Ruby on Rails and being a part of our team. I wanted to quickly introduce you to a few of them and their blogs, which I hope that you consider subscribing to.

Chris

For quite some time, we’ve been needing more design assistance, so late last year… we hired Chris Griffin, who moved here last year from Florida. He’s our new User Interface Designer and gets to work within the Rails environment everyday with the rest of us. It seems that Brian and Chris worked over the weekend to get his new blog up. Chris is self-proclaimed genius. I suggest that you keep an eye on his blog… because I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty active one. Chris joining our team marks a pivotal point in our teams evolution as we continue to place more emphasis in our Design and Development process on the User Experience.

• http://chriszgriffin.com/

Graeme

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Our newest hire is Graeme Nelson, who recently moved to Portland from Seattle. He just joined our Design and Development team and if you’ve been reading the Rails-related blogs, you might have seen his blog already. He’s been blogging a lot about using RSpec with Rails and other fun things. He’s been contracting with us since the start of the year and I’m really excited that he’s accepted a job offer and joined the team!

• http://blog.imperialdune.com/

Gary

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Last… but not least is Gary Blessington. I believe that I first offered Gary a job with PLANET ARGON about 2 1/2 years ago when we were still focused on PHP/PostgreSQL…. but PHP apparently wasn’t enough of a catalyst. Gary and I previously worked together at Imark Communications several years ago, when I first started doing web development. He was the senior developer on the team and was an important mentor during my early days of developing in a professional environment. Late last year, he hung up his .NET tool belt to become our Design and Development Director. He started blogging earlier this year and is sharing his experience of switching from .NET to Ruby on Rails.

• http://garyblessington.us/.

I’ll introduce the others as they start blogging and such. :-)

I’m going to be hanging out in Redmond, WA. late next month… why? That… I’ll explain at a later date. ;-)

What I can say is that I’ll be available on a few evenings if anybody is interested in meeting up to talk shop, which can include anything from d3, ruby on rails, bdd, agile interaction design. to BBC comedy shows. :-)

I’ll be flying up from Portland to Seattle on Saturday, March 24th. I’m going to try and stay downtown for that night… and then will be staying at Sheraton Bellevue until Tuesday night. So… Saturday-Monday nights are currently open.

I’m also planning to head to the monthly Seattle.rb meeting on Tuesday, March 27th.

If you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.

UPDATE If you’re taking the kinky aspect of BDD too serious. please don’t email me. ;-)

Recently, Seth Godin posted a short blog post, titled, Apologies, ranked, which points out several ways of apologizing. When you work in a service industry, it becomes very important to develop good apology skills. Let’s be honest for a moment. Not everything works out for the best in every customer experience. Sometimes it’s their fault and many times… it’s our fault.

In response to Seth’s post, Marc Chung has written up a similar post that adapts this to software bugs, titled, Seth on Fixing Bugs.

It’s worth a read and definitely relates to the communication issues that we keep talking about within the Dialogue-Driven Development community and how that can translate to a healthy testing process with BDD.

Thoughts?

In this new series, Get to Know a Gem, we’re going to take a look at hpricot.

What is Hpricot?

WhyTheLuckyStiff released Hpricot in July of 2006 in an effort to bring fast HTML parsing to the masses. It’s currently unknown what prompted it, but my guess would be that Why is secretly scraping all the pages on the internet that archive the future. To speed it up, Why has written the Hpricot scanner in C, to be much faster than the other options available in Ruby.

Installation

This process… is as always with most gems, very simple.

In a project that I’m currently working on, we’re handling recurring payments for subscribers. I’ve decided to play with a different payment service API on this project (TrustCommerce), which supposedly has one of the easier systems to handle recurring payments as well as one-time charges to the same credit cards. They store all the credit card data so that our delivered product to the client is CISP-compliant.

I came across the TrustCommerce Subscription plugin for Rails, which does just everything that I need to do in this first product release… as well as things that aren’t requirements just yet.

Well, I got my test account from TrustCommerce and was working on some RSpecs to test my new subscription and noticed that it was failing. After some snooping around the error responses, I realized that… test accounts don’t give you the ability to test the Citadel features of TrustCommerce. It’ll be another week or so before finish getting our account setup, so what am I to do? I really want to finish writing these specs and move on to the other portions that are dependent upon this working.

Suppose that you were going to perform something like this in an AR callback.

Just a quick follow up to my post last night, Sharing Custom TextMate Bundles with Subversion. It appears that I missed the RSpec bundle for TextMate, which is listed on the RSpec webpage.

Install the RSpec Bundle

Installation is quite simple, just change directories to your TextMate bundle directory.

I’m working on a few blog articles that I’ll be posting over the next few weeks. The other day, I got another email from someone that asked me if I would write about something that I mentioned briefly in a blog post. This got me thinking… perhaps there are things that you’d like me write something on? In general, I try to keep a broad range of topics that relate to Ruby/Rails circulating and I’m planning a major overhaul to my blog (switch to mephisto in the near future?) and working on more tutorials, especially as we near the release of my book as a O’Reilly Rough Cut… and when it finally makes it to print. :-)

If there is something that you’d like to learn more about (Rails, business, agile…), feel free to drop an email to suggestions@robbyonrails.com.

Mike Clark is offering everyone[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1 .footnote-ref role=”doc-noteref”} in the Ruby community Mardis Gras beads… in exchange for showing everyone your sexy gems. Chad and Bryan showed us theirs, so I figured it was my turn to show you all what I’ve been hiding beneath this shell.

Early last year, I began to start creating a bunch of snippets and such for TextMate, all of which were lost several months ago due to Hurricane iSight. I recently decided to start building some again, especially some that sped up my RSpec writing. After creating a few, I wondered, “would anybody else on my team want to help me write some?” So, I thought that it was time to figure out how to share my bundle with others and allow them to add stuff to it… which seems like a good job for Ms. Subversion.

I couldn’t find a quick walk-through online and found myself in the #textmate IRC channel getting proper instructions. (thank you Allan)

Create Your Bundle

In TextMate, you can open up the Bundle Editor and create a new bundle. Let’s call our custom bundle, RSpec. Go ahead and begin adding some snippets, commands, etc to your new custom bundle. Once you have something in your Bundle, you’ll want to reload your bundles, by going to Bundles > Bundle Editor > Reload Bundles. This will write your new bundle to disk to ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/.

One of our consulting clients consists of a team of .NET developers that are rewriting a rather large product in Ruby on Rails. Every once in a while they have a problem that needs a second set of eyes to look over in order to find a solution with Rails. One of their developers recently asked how they could extend ActionController to provide all of their controllers with an action that would interact with a custom extension they built for ActiveRecord.

One of the few examples that he found to help them do this was a short blog post that I wrote nearly two years ago, titled, Extending ActionController. Given that I wouldn’t do it that way anymore, I felt that I’d quickly post an updated way of doing something similar.

Create Your Extension

This is when you get to take advantage of that lonely lib/ directory in your Rails application. We’ll go ahead and save our custom extension as lib/giraffe_actioncontroller_ext.rb. Now let’s put some code in there.

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Looking at the following example, you’ll notice that we’re creating a basic Ruby module, which contains a method named, hot_air_balloon. Within that method, we can do just about anything that we’d normally do in an controller action.