Disqus - Latest Comments for jasonmorrisontb

Re: CoffeeScript: Spartan JavaScript

Jason Morrison — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:09:29 -0000

If you'd like to keep tabs on the Mozilla and WebKit project tickets for supporting JS-as-compilation-target: http://www.infoq.com/news/2...

Re: http://jasonmarrieslindsay.com/accomodations.html

Jason Morrison — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:57:10 -0000

Hey guys - glad you got the invite! How are things down your way? (It's *gotta* be crazy warm and humid this time of year.) We just added registry information (with some pretty exciting life plans!) to the site.

See you guys around WNY in a future Christmas holiday (well, after said exciting life plans), I hope? Hope you're both well! ~Lindsay & Jason

Re: Hoptoad now supports GitHub integration!

Jason Morrison — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 11:28:00 -0000

Hi Turadg,

This doesn't require Capistrano and will work so long as the REPO variable on the `rake hoptoad:deploy` task points to a Github repository - see http://help.hoptoadapp.com/... (specifically the gist in the Engine Yard Cloud section) for more details.

Thanks,
Jason

Re: Feature branch code reviews

Jason Morrison — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:54:06 -0000

I just started doing this (I'm the jm- at the beginning of that branch name) and have really enjoyed it. From the outside, I thought this seemed like a very noisy and distracting process. While it does add to the list of things that grab your attention during the day, I think that it's definitely worthwhile.

Code reviews get more eyes on the code, which leads to improvement. It helps best practices spread throughout a team more quickly. Doing code reviews helps me see more of the app, which helps with code ownership and a project's bus number.

Granted, this is a larger project (8-10ish devs?) so these things are even more valuable. I'm curious how much value this process adds for smaller (2-3 person) teams.

Is anyone else doing this on large teams? Small teams? If you're not doing this, definitely try it out for a week. I'd love to hear how it goes.

Re: OSX Error: steam needs to be online to update.

Jason Morrison — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 22:15:57 -0000

Seems to have fixed it! Now if only I could get >40K/s ;)

Thanks for posting this, Chris.

Re: OSX Error: steam needs to be online to update.

Jason Morrison — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:04:41 -0000

Having this problem several times in a row now. I'll try downloading by hand & see if that fixes it.

Re: Hoptoad is now available as a Heroku Addon

Jason Morrison — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:16:02 -0000

Another common issue we're trying to address with this is consulting shops needing to bill their clients for services like Hoptoad, or asking their clients to sign up and pay for several services separately. If you're a consulting shop that deploys to Heroku, you no longer have to buy your own large Hoptoad plan(s), or ask the client to sign up for both Heroku and Hoptoad - they can pay for Hoptoad for their project through the Heroku Addons platform, hopefully simplifying this process for all parties.

Re: Heroku | Release Management on Heroku

Jason Morrison — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 14:59:09 -0000

That's awesome. Really great work!

Re: Track iOS crashes with Hoptoad

Jason Morrison — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:48:06 -0000

Jared, I opened a support issue on your behalf with the Device ID idea. The short of it is "there's a straightforward way you can add it" - drop by http://help.hoptoadapp.com/... and chat with Caleb there if you have further questions.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: Track iOS crashes with Hoptoad

Jason Morrison — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:48:19 -0000

Thanks, Jared! I'm pumped that you like it - thanks for dropping us a note to say so. Let us know if there are any improvements or changes you'd like to see.

Re: Hoptoad is on AppSumo’s November Developer Bundle

Jason Morrison — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 11:10:57 -0000

We love our customers - thanks for using Hoptoad! But unfortunately it doesn't make business sense to make the next four months of everyone's paid service free. Even if you're already a happy Hoptoad customer, I bet there are enough other services in the bundle that you could use to make it a steal.

Re: Wesley Beary and fog Promoted to the Engine Yard Open Source Program

Jason Morrison — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:24:48 -0000

What is the Engine Yard Open Source Program?

Re: What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do

Jason Morrison — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:57:54 -0000

Hi Donald,

Thanks for your comments. I think it is important to go into a prototype with the mindset of "building one to throw away" - if we're hedging our bets, and considering the possibility of keeping the code around, we'll spend more time and effort on the spike than necessary. When we put on pause the considerations of technical debt, test-driven development, we can move much more quickly to answer questions like "Are we on the right path?" and "Will these tools support the breadth of use cases we'd like?"

Whether test-after development can reap the module-level design benefits of test-driven design is a slightly different discussion -- though I would argue that test driving your code leads to better design. Code that is hard to test is a code smell for high coupling or convoluted interfaces, where code that is test-driven tends to be more loosely coupled by necessity, since you build clients of your interfaces before constructing the actual interfaces.

There are other considerations, of course - although here we contrasted writing a spike with test-driven development, you could also compare a spike of user-facing software against a design-driven (or "Interface first") approach. These technology spikes intentionally abandoned usability and design concerns, and served primarily to help us learn about a handful of technical options in this domain and give us experience with the tools we might use in the real product. I think your example was considering the construction of an API rather than user-facing software, in which case this is less of a concern.

It's interesting that you mention API design - I find writing tests first a helpful tool in API design, since the act of writing tests is also a chance to explore what clients of the API will expect. I often design my ideal API by writing unit tests, consciously foregoing knowledge of the SUT's internals, and focusing on the experience of using the API.

Re: Missed connections: I saw you testing my website

Jason Morrison — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:09:21 -0000

Thanks for detailing this, Chad - it's nice to see the nuts and bolts of a usability study.

Did you find that Silverback gave you all the details you are interested in? Did you take notes during the study, or did you primarily form conclusions after the tests, e.g. during a video review process?

What are the next steps? Would you typically review the interviews (or your synthesized notes) with a client, or fold these findings into another iteration prior to presenting something new to the client?

Re: The community's hopping all over Hoptoad

Jason Morrison — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:29:03 -0000

Hi Khash,

Thanks! I've added SharpHop to our list of 3rd-party plugins and notifiers:

http://help.hoptoadapp.com/...

Re: After 35 Robot Years, The New thoughtbot.com Is Here!

Jason Morrison — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:04:25 -0000

I wish it had unicorns and rainbows on it.

Re: Matt’s manifesto for a science data platform

Jason Morrison — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:57:54 -0000

Hey folks,

I'm really thrilled to see discussion coming together on this topic, and am trying to come up to speed on all the existing technologies, projects, and ontologies. Jamie, thanks very much for the links and information about AnIML - looks fantastic, and I'll get in touch after I do some reading.

I'm *particularly* pumped about this statement: "At the moment we have gained the attention of most of the big instrumentation manufactures and are in the process of wrapping up version 1.0 of the standard."

I was also quite excited to read Cameron Neylon's "Head in the clouds: Re-imagining the experimental laboratory record for the web-based networked world" at http://www.aejournal.net/co... - thoughts?

Re: litany against fear ¤ by nick quaranto ¤ Gem Bundler is the Future

Jason Morrison — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:10:16 -0000

(e.g. a way to convert Gemfile to .gems, or something along those lines)

Re: litany against fear ¤ by nick quaranto ¤ Gem Bundler is the Future

Jason Morrison — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:55:29 -0000

Hey Nick,

Is there a recommended strategy for using bundler and Gemfile with an application deployed to Heroku? (Let me know if there's a better forum in which to ask that question).

Thanks for the writeup! My weekly lunch orders will soon come with bundles of gems ;)

Jason

Re: High Quality Ruby on Rails Example Applications

Jason Morrison — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:22:44 -0000

Great list! Thanks for taking the time to assemble and share this. I somehow didn't know that spree existed!

Re: the update | gemcutter | awesome gem hosting

Jason Morrison — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:05:28 -0000

Wow, congrats on the RubyForge merger! Gemcutter's looking slick!

Re: assert rand() > 0.5

Jason Morrison — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:59:35 -0000

@mrdias - That's a great suggestion. Any technique which yields predictable and consistent fixture data is desirable, whether the data generated has an obvious pattern, like a sequence, or a pattern which is more shuffled but still predictable, like shams.

@Peter - Interesting. Could you share some of the examples when randomized test data revealed actual bugs? Was it straightforward to identify the issue? Thanks!

Re: Make your test suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST!

Jason Morrison — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:40:00 -0000

Thanks, Dan! I must admit, though, that I have gotten where I am today by standing on the shoulders of giants. I would like to acknowledge Mike Burns for his vast array of subtle and witty writing techniques (e.g. leverging his vasty deep of internet pictures).

Re: Ruby-GitHub: Simple Access to the GitHub API - Intridea Company Blog

Jason Morrison — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:42:34 -0000

This is awesome! But, unfortunately, GitHub seems to have gone and changed something, because I get:

irb(main):010:0* user = GitHub::API.user('mbleigh')
<github::user company="Intridea, Inc." name="Michael Bleigh">
SystemStackError: stack level too deep
from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:100:in `dup'
from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:213:in `stringify_keys'
from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:131:in `deep_update'
from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mash-0.0.3/lib/mash.rb:50:in `initialize'

Re: Clearance: Rails authentication for developers who write tests

Jason Morrison — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:46:00 -0000

@Eric Mill, @Dan Croak,

I generally have a very averse reaction to lots of generated code, but I definitely enjoy the level of “code intimacy” with Clearance. Since the generated code is actually almost entirely mixins, it ends up looking something like:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base include Clearance::App::Controllers::ApplicationController end