Matthew Lang

Yeah, I know. It's a single-speed. But you can't deny it's a rather fetching bike.

via PEDAL Consumption

The different sound components of the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive failing explained by Ben Burtt. The biplane used was probably more reliable than that hunk of junk.

I haven't been reading the Dr Dobb's site for a while but back in my days as a .NET developer, it was a regular place to visit. Still, it's a shame to see there won't be any new content after the end of the year.

No amount of analysis and explanation can mask the deep, personal sadness I feel at writing about this decision. Like many of you, I grew up reading Dr. Dobb's. For me, as I suspect it was for many of you, Dr. Dobb's Journal was the lifeline to a thorough understanding of programming. I recall that when the magazine appeared in my mailbox, all other activity for the day came to a sudden stop and the remaining hours were spent blissfully poring over article after article, soaking in the information. I learned C from Allen Holub's C Chest column, operating systems from the 18-part series on 386BSD, video programming from Michael Abrash's Black Book, and data compression from Mark Nelson. And so on — each month brought new, enabling insights and explanations of often arcane topics.

— Farewell, Dr. Dobb's by Dr Dobb's

Feedbin has been my goto RSS Reader ever since Google Reader closed. I'm glad to see that development is continuing at a good pace with new features being added regularly, including the new Updated section that includes articles that have been updated after being published.

Excellent for keeping track of changes to articles.

In the last few weeks I've been working on a Rails 3 application for a client. The test suite doesn't cover the whole application, so along with features being added for the client, I've been gradually expanding the test suite to cover the entire application.

The test suite itself uses Minitest and the test syntax. So far I've had an enjoyable experience in adding tests for each part of the application. This week though I faced an issue of duplication in my tests. The application includes a number of mailers. Each mailer has an erb and plain text template. In my first pass at testing this mailer I had some duplication going on with the different templates for each mailer.

assert_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail.text_part.to_s)
assert_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail.html_part.to_s)

This is just one of many lines in the tests that assert that the two mailer types include the right content. Wouldn't it be nice to wrap these two assertions into one?

Minitest allows you to define your own assertions but up until this time I made do with Minitest and Rails' own assertions. Turns out that adding your own assertions to Minitest is easily done. I included the following assertion in my test_helper file but you can include your own assertions in a seperate file if you want to and then include that in your test_helper file using require.

module Minitest::Assertions
  def assert_mail_match(expected, actual)
    ["text","html"].each do |mail_part|
      assert_match(expected, actual.send("#{mail_part}_part").to_s)
    end
  end
end

What we're doing is adding a wrapper around Mintest's assert_match method and pass in our expected value and the actual value. The method will iterate over the two mail parts in the mailer and assert that each format has the correct corresponding content.

We can now call the new assertion in our tests:

assert_mail_match(/Hi there #{person.first_name}/, mail)

Wrapping these two assertions into one makes sense. The template formats for the mailers is unlikely to change and the two different formats have the same content albeit with different formatting.

After a couple of years of using RSpec, Minitest has been a nice change to how I test the Rails applications I'm working on. Its syntax and single way of doing things means that I find it easier to write tests. Hopefully, I'll be able to share more insights into using Minitest in the future.

If you’re serious about growing your business, I want to challenge you to aim high. Don’t just think what you need to do to grow your business by 20% — or even double your business. As you work on your goals for next year, my challenge to you is to consider thinking big. Can you imagine growing your business by 10X?

— Getting your goals ready for the next year – go for 10x by Curtis McHale

I've been following Curtis McHale's career closely and I would love to see him making this goal. He's already got me thinking about my convservative goal to increase my income by 25% for next year.