String#gollumize

 class String
   def gollumize 
     self.pluralize + "es" 
   end  
 end  

"pocket".gollumize
=> "pocketses"

...just because :D

Life at 38

When I was 5 I liked to do jigsaw puzzles upside down (to make it harder) and blow bubbles off the balcony -- watching them drift over the street. I liked to walk to school by myself (one block) and learn Origami from the lady in the flats behind us.

When I was 7 I wished on every star that I could have a baby sister. When I was 8, I got one.

When I was 10 I liked to explore the backways of Oyster Bay, picking flowers to make perfume (which smelled terrible). I played fantasy make-believe games with my cousins - involving magic and unicorns, where we saved the world.

When I was 12 I got another sister.... I stopped wishing. :)

When I was 13 I liked to play make-believe with my sisters and all the younger cousins. Gordy and I plotted adventures for us all, in-amongst the bamboo.

When I was 15 I liked to climb up on the roof and watch the clouds drift by. I liked to ride my bike home from school and play LARP in the park across the road.

When I was 17 I liked to swim in the backyard pool, drifting underwater with my hair floating loose around me. I liked to frantically scribble in my diary and day-dream about movies; making up adventure stories or inserting myself as a character in my favourites.

When I was 20 I loved the freedom of being independent, waking up in my own flat to the sound of Cockatoos in the pine-trees. I liked being free to wake up in the afternoon and go for a walk in the twilight, or in the quiet time after the curfew painted the streets with night. I liked staying up all night, having coffee with friends, as television got progressively more idiotic. As the sky began to warm with first light - I went out again. I liked feeling the expectant hush of the cool dawn, then retiring before the hustle woke up.

When I was 22 I loved my writing diary - pouring out my heart or playing with words, crafting new worlds on a page. I liked learning new things -- drifting from subject to subject. I liked psychology, programming and the occult. I loved my cats. I liked it that I got married and was somebody's wife. I liked meditating with my husband -- humming toneful chords without meaning. I liked learning martial arts with him.

When I was 24 I loved my garden. I spent days drifting through it and tending to the plants. I liked picking silver-beet and herbs and cooking up a meal that I'd taken from seed to table. I liked shopping at Bunnings for fruit trees. I liked spending Saturday nights with the Druids, singing, meditating, drinking mead and telling stories. Then the morning-afters, skinny-dipping in the wading-pool as the sun climbed the sky.

When I was 26 I moved interstate by myself, to see the Big City. I liked exploring the back-areas of Chatswood in search of great food. I loved hacking together brilliant solutions for colleagues desperately late on their projects. I liked rock-climbing with my work-mates and playing network games in the training room until late at night. I wrote a dictionary of elvish (quenya).

When I was 28 I loved freedom. The freedom to choose my own time, to choose what to learn, to work on my own projects. I liked smiling at my young class-mates who complained about the work - knowing this was easy compared with Real Work. I liked the meditation of archery. I liked spending my time reading while sipping coffee, or eating noodles at the local hole-in-the-wall. I liked long walks in the evening, scoping out my local territory.

When I was 30 I liked building my own small business, knowing I owned it and I could achieve whatever I wanted. I liked learning medieval crafts alongside eager students, and feasting with friends in a medieval campsite. I liked reading books, sipping coffee after a good workout at the gym. I liked watching myself learn how to walk again.

When I was 32 I enjoyed being a senior developer, being at the top of my form as well as earning high pay. I enjoyed choosing my first major investments in shares and buying my first property. I loved planning what to do with my life, and choosing to gather interesting experiences around me - New Zealand, the Northern Territory, Thailand. I learned photography, spanish and investing. I watched a *lot* of DVDs.

When I was 34 I moved internationally by myself. I loved exploring in a new country: visiting ancient ruins and watching Shakespeare at the Globe. I enjoyed getting better at photography, meeting new people and seeing new places. I built my own startup with friends. I enjoyed my morning coffee at the local in Windsor, and walking past a castle on my way to work in the morning. I loved pottering around in my allotment late into the long, english summer nights.

When I was 36 I loved getting about europe in my first car; learning French, and then eating my way around the French countryside. I enjoyed picking fresh fruit/veg from my allotment and making blackberry pie. I loved the lazy schedule allowed by working from home, and lazy Sunday afternoons drinking velvety latte with a Cranberry-and-orange muffin at my local cafe in Windsor, in view of the castle.

When I was 38 I loved being in the thick of things in the medieval group - I was president of the NSW branch (200 paid members, 10 direct and 8 indirect reports). I helped coordinate others who were running feasts and balls and camps and craft classes. I taught a class of newbies to build websites in Rails in 12 intense-but-rewarding full-time weeks. I enjoyed dinners with my cousins, and weekends going to the markets with them and then spending the day cooking preserves, jams and soups to feast upon in the weeks to come.

---

This post began as an exercise: "for every five years, write what you enjoyed doing". It helps you find out what you most enjoy - and how your tastes change over time. I also like to do it to remind me of the good things in life - which can be so easy to forget sometimes.

STOP YELLING! or how to validate a field isn't in ALLCAPS

TuShare lets people give away things they no longer need. It turns out that some people think that putting their headings in ALLCAPS will get more attention... but we think it just annoys people (nobody likes to BE YELLED AT!). Here's a quick snippet that lets you validate that your users aren't YELLING AT YOU! in any given field.

1) create a custom validator in app/validators/not_allcaps_validator.rb with the following code:

# we don't want our users YELLING AT US!
class NotAllcapsValidator < ActiveModel::EachValidator
  def validate_each(record, attribute, value)
    if value.present? && (value.upcase == value)
      record.errors[attribute] << (options[:message] || ""is in ALLCAPS. Please don't YELL AT US (we're sensitive types). Instead, just use normal sentence case. I promise we'll still hear you from over here. :)")
    end
  end
end

2) use it in your model like this:

   validate :name, :description, :not_allcaps => true

3) Add a custom matcher for rspec:

# validates that this field has the "not_allcaps" validator
RSpec::Matchers.define :validate_not_allcaps do |attribute|
  match_for_should do
    match do |model|
      model.send("#{attribute}=", "AN ALLCAPS VALUE")
      !model.valid? && model.errors.has_key?(attribute)
    end
 
    failure_message_for_should do |model|
      "#{model.class} should validate that #{attribute.inspect} cannot accept ALLCAPS VALUES"
    end
 
    failure_message_for_should_not do |model|
      "#{model.class} should validate that #{attribute.inspect} can accept ALLCAPS VALUES"
    end 
  end
end

4) test each field in your model specs with:

    it { should validate_not_allcaps(:name) }
    it { should validate_not_allcaps(:description) }

Link: Why I am leaving the best job I ever had

an awesome post by Max Schireson to remind us of our priorities in life: Why I am leaving the best job I ever had

"Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO..."

Link: Guidelines for growing a stable codebase

"Software projects need to evolve over time, but they also need to avoid collapsing under their own weight. This balancing act is something that most programmers understand, but it is often hard to communicate its importance to nontechnical stakeholders. Because of this disconnect, many projects operate under the false assumption that they must stagnate in order to stabilize.

"This fundamental misconception about how to maintain a stable codebase has some disastrous effects: it causes risk-averse organizations to produce stale software that quickly becomes irrelevant, while risk-seeking organizations ship buggy code in order to rush features out the door faster than their competitors. In either case, the people who depend on the software produced by these teams give up something they shouldn't have to."

Guidelines for growing a stable codebase covers six useful techniques for keeping your codebase stable while it increases in size. Well worth a read.

10K on Stack Overflow

w00t!

This morning I finally got the 10k moderator tools privilege on StackOverflow. You can see it here: Taryn East on Stack Overflow

Pardon me while I blow my horn for a moment, but it's taken me nearly five years to get here...

Link: Getting rid of intermittent feature spec failures

Intermittent feature spec failures are the bane of testing experience.

They cause builds to fail at random (which really screws with you when you have continuous deployment based on master-branch merges). But more insidiously, they lead to bit-rot in your test suite - because once you get used to tests failing at random, you tend to overlook it when they do... which leads to bad code falling through the cracks at the worst times.

Patrick Bacon's article: These Intermittent Test Failures Will Not Stand, Man has a small selection of useful things you can do to address these failures and root them out for good.

Rails migrations for zero-downtime sites

At TuShare we have a zero-downtime site with continuous deployment (ie, you merge to master, and away it goes to production...)

The zero-downtime part means that as the new code goes out, the old servers are still up and running until the new code is fully loaded and ready to roll... and they only then get pulled down.

This is great for uptime, but does mean you have to be extra careful about any migrations. The database must work with both the old code and the new code.

My colleague pointed me at this article: Rails migrations with no downtime. which has some in-depth coverage of the topic. What kinds of things cause errors, what you can do to reduce the pain of change-over.

Working with TuShare

So, I've got a job at TuShare.

TuShare are a little like FreeCycle - people login to either give away their excess clutter, or get some free stuff from others.

But there is one main difference - instead of having to pick the items up yourself, TuShare offers seamless integration with a courier system for any items smaller than 5kg. You still have the option of going out to pick the item(s) up (which you still have to do for furniture and large objects), but you also have the option of a door-to-door courier service for only $10 within your capital city, or $25 for city-city service.

Personally, that extra convenience is extremely appealing to me, and I used it about a month ago to get myself a brand new-to-me juicer. Since then I've put up 6 items of my own, from random old computer bits to a futon left with me by a friend who moved house.

TuShare has a small dev team, but there's a lot to work on - especially after the boom in users following the Global Sharing Day events held last week.

The people are lovely and I'm really looking forward to working with them.

Link: Open-plan offices don't work

Just read an interesting article by Maria Konnikova called The open-office trap

The TL;DR version is that while open-plan offices give employees a feeling of belonging to an open, laid-back company. The actual measured performance of employees shows that they are "damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction."

Link: Service Objects in Rails

Steve Lorek has written a nice overview of Service Objects: What They Are, and When to Use Them.

"There has been a lot of discussion within the Ruby community around the service objects pattern. The term "service objects" may be unfamiliar to even seasoned Rails developers, because Rails itself implements the Model-View-Controller design pattern. There is no concept of a 'service' in a new Rails application. So it's understandable that this concept may seem foreign, and indeed non-obvious. However, I believe that the service objects pattern is well worth considering for any non-trivial Rails application."

It's a quick read, and gives a very good introduction/overview to when and why to use service objects in Rails.

---

Further to the above. If you have a Railscasts-pro account, you can watch this video on Service Objects.

It starts with an example of modularising out the functionality of a FAT model, using concerns. He then describes why he doesn't prefer that approach (my first introduction to the brilliant phrase "grep-driven-development") and finishes up with an alternative using service objects instead.

It's Rails-3 oriented - so you know you don't have to do anything special to include the concerns directory anymore... but otherwise his examples are still quite relevant and a great intro to the practicalities of how to actually go about a simple service-object and/or modularisation refactor.

---

Finally, don't forget some of the classic articles on this subject from DHH's Put chubby models on a diet with concerns to Bryan Helmkamp's 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models

Link: Up goer five text editor

XKCD has a comic called Up Goer Five - which is a comic that describes all the details of what I'm guessing is a Saturn V rocket... but only using the set of 1000 most commonly used words of the english language... it ends up pretty funny :)

and now he's also released an upgoer5 text editor that lets you try to write anything, so long as it is using the "ten hundred" most commonly-used words.

Here's my attempt at describing what I do for a living:

There is a place where lots of computers are joined to lots of other computers. You can put words and pictures there that other people can read. There are groups of people that like to make things that other people can buy. These groups get me to make words and pictures that look pretty, to let other people know about the things their group makes. Then, people with computers can come to the place with lots of computers joined together. They come and look at the words I wrote and the pictures I put with the words, and decide if they want to buy the things the group made.

It's more difficult to be clear than you might think...

Link: programming sucks

Programming sucks

"Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

"They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming."

:)

Classic: The Law of Leaky Abstractions by Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky's classic: The Law of Leaky Abstractions is still well worth a read today.

Many of today's high-level tools abstract away the low-level details to such an extent that 99% of the time, you don't even need to know they're there. But it's that 1% of the time that's the doozy. When everything suddenly blows up because you accidentally crossed an invisible line you didn't know was there... how can you figure out what went wrong and how to fix it?

The low-level detail leaks through.

So often, even though you're using an abstracted, high-level tool, you often still have to learn all the lower-level stuff it was helpfully abstracting way.

An example would be a need to learn sql in order to understand joins and includes (and how they go wrong) in Rails' Active Relation

Link: Female Founders by Paul Graham

Paul Graham (of Y-Combinator) writes some amazingly worthwhile essays. One of his recent ones is about what he's learned about Female founders

Read to discover:
Is YC anti-female (spoiler: no)
Do female founders fare differently in startup culture (spoiler: sometimes, but that should rapidly improve)
What can we do to encourage more females to be founders?

Heartbleed: openSSL has been compromised test your site!

So, you may have read that there's a security vulnerability in OpenSSL called Heartbleed. It's pretty serious and potentially affects everyone. You should change all your passwords right now.

Read more about it here: Here's How To Protect Yourself From The Massive Security Flaw That's Taken Over The Internet

You can use this site to test any site you care to try: Heartbleed test

Quit being so negative!

Interacting with other people is all about perceptions. For better or worse, we can't see inside of other peoples' heads and have to infer what's inside of them based on their actions... and also on (get this) *our* past behaviour.

You thought it would be *their* past behaviour, yes? but actually unless you've known somebody a really long time - your perceptions of another person are more based on what you have done in the past, than on what they have.

It's way too easy to totally miss this point when it comes up in reality - because what you think another person is doing... just seems so obvious. Surely they're doing X, it's just obvious they are...

What you don't see are all the subconscious micro-decisions that got you to that point. What exactly did you base your observation on?

Could you be mis-interpreting something? Just because you (or your sister, your boyfriend or your old teacher back in high school) used to do X and that meant they thought Y - doesn't mean that this person you're talking to right now... thinks Y - even if they're quite clearly doing X.

This all stems from a bit of an example from my own life (I'm T):

P comes up to T and tells her all about a friend of his who's developing a new javascript library.
"it's gonna be awesome!" P enthuses.
"interesting," T says. "so what does it offer over jquery?"
"what do you mean?", P asks, looking taken aback.
"well, jquery is pretty bog-standard in the web-world right now. What does your friend's library do, that would make me choose to use it over jQuery?" T replies.
"why are you asking me that? It's a great library, it's going to be the best!", P asks

We'll stop here and see where everybody stands, because I know from later discussion that P is thinking that I'm not interested in hearing about this new project. He thinks that *I* think it's only worth doing a project if it's better than jQuery. Why else would I demand what this new project had to offer and whether or not it was worth pursuing? How dismissive of me!

Hang on a tick... what did I *actually* say?

None of the above, it turns out. From my perspective, I was curious about the project and wondering what it might have to offer.

It think it all hinges on what part we both assume the role of questions plays.

I assume that questions are to elicit information on something of interest.
P assumed that questions were a way of poking holes in an idea and dismissing it.

Both of these are assumptions based on our own past history of using questions.

Perhaps when P questions something it's because he has strong reservations about it, or because he's decided it's a bad idea and he wants to highlight all the flaws in it... but assuming that that's the reason why *another* person asks questions... will lead to very great misunderstandings.

No doubt there are downsides to my own assumption - obviously that other people will get the wrong idea about my reasons for doing so... perhaps thinking that I'm attacking their idea instead of finding out more about it.

The biggest part of the problem is that that these assumptions are pretty-much invisible to us. To us it just feels like "the way it is"... not "my perspective". it's only when we brush up against somebody else's different perspective that we even notice they're there at all (like two people with different-coloured sun-glasses finally swapping notes about the colour of objects they see).

I haven't got a solution to this problem yet... I'd be curious if any of you readers out there do. feel free to comment and let me know.

Speaking Eloquent Javascript - learn javascript (and programming) for free

Eloquent javascript seems a nice site for learning programming for free, by working your way through a free textbook.

I've only skimmed it myself - I've been working my way through Code School's Javascript path.

Another that's just come out is Speaking javascript (an O'Reilly book that's also online for free)

I've heard good things about both of these.

Have you tried either one? If so, tell me what you think, or if you have a better (free) source, let me know in the comments.

Link: Australia's top female programmers

Pollenizer has posted a list of what they call Australia's top female programmers.

I apparently made the grade... but it's a little scary to see my name amongst some of the most awesome women coders I've met over the years...

The failure of the ruby community - and what we can do about it

Sam Peters holds up a dark mirror in which our community reflects more poorly than I'd have hoped to see.

Her post on ruby meetups and the developer community is particularly worth a read for those of us happily ensconced inside that echo chamber.

Some representative quotes:

"[at ruby meetups] people who knew one another would connect, catch up, and spend the time excitedly discussing the latest news. To one another. Exclusively."

"Upon my attendance [at ROROSyd] I was immediately struck by the small, tight groups of people scattered across the venue – something that felt quite intimidating as a new learner"

"My more unorthodox theory implies that this community is merely an illusion"

The words "scathing indictment" spring to mind.

Clearly this is not the kind of community that we want.

As a mob, we can be pretty intimidating - and we need to work on better outreach and inclusiveness at our meetups.

I remember the earliest days of the rails community in Sydney. I remember when everybody was a beginner, and we came together to share our solutions to the hard problems we faced, to welcome newbies and help each other grow into skilled rubyists.

One particular observation of hers at rubyconf gives an example of what we can do better:

" I also experienced a bit of community on a personal level too – one particular lunch time, a pair of developers invited me to their table with no pretence or expectation. It resulted in a rather pleasant lunch, and opened my eyes a little. I felt a little more welcome."

In other words - it doesn't take much.

If there are people at your local meetup looking new and alone, go over and say hi. Ask them about their experience in ruby, invite them to sit at your table. Just start the conversation and include them.

I'm personally hoping to help break down that barrier-to-entry with Ruby Women - to provide at lest one extra avenue into the scene via a smaller, more beginner-friendly meetup and more open network of friend

The full article is well worth a read and some careful self-reflection. We should take note and work hard to build something better.