Joseph Wilk

I’m really excited to be giving a talk at this years Scotland on Rails conference in Edinburgh.

I’ll be talking about working outside-in with Cucumber and RSpec. Having used Cucumber and as a member of the Cucumber core developer team I hope to share lots of experiences and lessons about getting the most out of the tool.

It’s looking like a great line up with with some really interesting presentations across a broad number of topics. The keynotes speakers are Michael Feathers and Marcel Molina, Jnr.

If you’re going to be in Edinburgh for the conference or have any burning questions about Cucumber, let me know.

I’ve recently been helping interview some ruby/rails developers. I searched the web for some inspiration but I could not find any example questions that had real depth to them. I like my questions to be a point of discussion rather than one word answers. Most importantly I want a wide enough scope to let those talented individuals shine through. So here are some of the questions I’ve been trying out recently.

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Rspec-rails is a rails plugin which brings the Rspec Ruby Behaviour Driven Development framework to rails along with some rails specific helpers. One of these hugely useful helper functions is:

mock_model(model_class, options_and_stubs = {})

This creates a mock object with the common methods stubbed out. It also allows you to specify other methods you want to stub.
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A brief examination of some of the major Admin plugins for rails.

• Lipsiaadmin
• AutoAdmin
• ActiveScaffold
• Hobo
• Streamlined

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The Magically Appearing Admin

Web developers using an MVC framework produce their websites playing with their models, views and controllers. Then by adding a few lines of magic an admin system appears which allows users to add/edit/delete/view/search their models.

Examples:
Django’s Magic Admin (Also NewFormsAdmin – a branch of Django focused on making it easier to customise auto-admin)
Ruby on rails Plugins:

• Streamlined framework – http://streamlinedframework.org/
  • Admin magic/config – outside of the models
• Auto-Admin – http://code.trebex.net/auto-admin
  • Admin magic/config – inside the models

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