Coding | 8th Light

Framework Seams

mike knepper
20 Sep 2017
Coding

I recently created an open source plugin for Jekyll, the Ruby static site generator. Jekyll LilyPond Converter (henceforth JLC; source, RubyGems) converts specified code snippets...more.

Myths about Unit Tests

Most modern languages that we use today provide tools and documentation for unit tests, which make it simpler to test our code. If unit testing...more.

How JSON decoding works in Elm—Part 3

kofi gumbs
29 Aug 2017
Coding

Elm approaches JSON much differently than languages like JavaScript and Ruby. Elm's built-in functions don't offer the immediate convenience of JSON.parse. You'll find built-in Decoders...more.

Refactoring React

One of my favorite front-end tools these days is React, and those who've talked with me about front-end work know I'm vocal about it. I...more.

Does the open/closed principle apply to Elm?

rob looby
08 Aug 2017
Coding

A discussion came up the other day about if and how the Open/Closed Principle (OCP) was applicable to Elm. The OCP can be stated as...more.

Project Build Protocol

The Problem Working in many different languages across multiple projects means it's often a pain to remember how to build all the different components. How...more.

How JSON decoding works in Elm—Part 2

kofi gumbs
17 Jul 2017
Coding

Elm approaches JSON much differently than languages like JavaScript and Ruby. Elm's built-in functions don't offer the immediate convenience of JSON.parse. You'll find built-in Decoders...more.

How JSON decoding works in Elm—Part 1

kofi gumbs
28 Jun 2017
Coding

Elm approaches JSON much differently than languages like JavaScript and Ruby. Elm's built-in functions don't offer the immediate convenience of JSON.parse. You'll find built-in Decoders...more.

API Assumption Tests

In any non-trivial codebase we rely on third-party dependencies. These dependencies can be libraries or frameworks, but can also be external services that provide an...more.

Scope And Closures In Javascript

To understand closures and their use in JavaScript, it is essential to understand that closures rely on the scope mechanism. So, before we jump into...more.

Two Design Patterns You're Probably Already Using

I came into this field from a very non-technical background. And when I say very non-technical, I mean that I was an elementary fine arts...more.

The Core of Erlang

kofi gumbs
02 May 2017
Coding

I've spent the last few months implementing a compiler that targets the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). BEAM code itself seemed like a tricky initial target,...more.

Using an Elixir Umbrella

Elixir Applications In Elixir, an application is a component implementing some specific functionality. It is a unit that can be run independently, thus started and...more.

Forcing Function in Software Development Processes

I first came across the idea of forcing function from reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. The premise is that in fields such as...more.

A few DTrace gotchas and workarounds on OS X

colin jones
02 Feb 2017
Coding
Tools
Ruby

I've run into lots of folks who have heard about the cool stuff DTrace can do, but for one reason or another have run into...more.

Keeping Third-Party Swift Dependencies Testable

mike knepper
30 Jan 2017
Coding

When adding a third-party library to a project, I typically find plenty of examples of how to use the library in a dead-simple, script-like way,...more.

Comparing Common LISP and Clojure: Cons Cells

sarah sunday
24 Jan 2017
Coding
Clojure

The existence (or lack thereof) of cons cells in Clojure might be one of the first things LISPers notice when switching to Clojure. It was...more.

Common Code Smells

Developers are typically trained to look out for and guard against logical errors that have been accidentally introduced to their code. Such errors will range...more.

Optimizing your workflow with Vim

When I first started working in Vim, reading Bram Moolenaar's Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing was very helpful. In it, he outlines three fundamental...more.

Designing for Pipeline Transformations

damon kelley
07 Dec 2016
Coding

Pipeline transformations can be a wonderful mechanism for creating self-describing code. Many languages offer a built-in pipe operator. The list includes Elixir, F#, Clojure1, Hack,...more.

Code is better when we write it together

In my last post I discussed the effectiveness of code reviews. Or rather, how they can often be ineffective. I proposed pair programming as a...more.

The problematic pull request

Code reviews are a wonderful thing. Multiple pairs of eyes make for higher quality code. Reviews help spot errors and also serve as a teaching...more.

Don't make it perfect, make it work and refine

Have you ever had trouble starting something? I'm not talking about starting a car in winter, but some work, maybe a new project or a...more.

Perfect code is an illusion

Much of our programmer culture is built on the ideal of perfect code: code which not only works, but is also clean and elegant. We...more.

Getting Rails on Track - Part 3: Controllers

In this multi-series blog post, we're going hands-on through the steps that can help transform the design of a default Rails application into one with...more.

Assimilating with Clojure

Functional Programming nowadays is seen as kind of sexy by some sects of programmers and developers. Object Oriented Programming has for so long been a...more.

Getting Rails on Track - Part 2: Views

In this multi-series blog post, we're going hands-on through the steps that can help transform the design of a default Rails application into one with...more.

Getting Rails on Track - Part 1: Models

In this multi-series blog post, we're going hands-on through the steps that can help transform the design of a default Rails application into one with...more.

Docker Compose: Wait for Dependencies

If you have ever used Docker Compose to run multi-container applications, there is a good chance that you have run into the following situation. Service...more.

Clojure is boring

colin jones
06 Oct 2016
Coding
Clojure

You've probably heard the sales pitch for Clojure before. It's simple! It's scalable! It turns you into a genius who can machine-learn their way out...more.

TDD in ClojureScript

I recently started a ClojureScript project, for fun not pay, which might surprise those who know me well. You see, when I had used ClojureScript...more.

The egoless programmer

If you want to be successful at writing code, then you’d best keep your ego out of it. That’s the essence of egoless programming, a...more.

Fundamental tensions in code smells

I recently saw a terrific talk by Sandi Metz at the Abstractions conference where she encouraged the audience to learn to identify the concrete code...more.

Constructor Injection with the Unity Container

malcolm newsome
27 Sep 2016
Coding

Dependency injection[1] is a powerful pattern that is relatively simple to implement. However, it is often overlooked—or even misunderstood—in the development of many web applications....more.

Keeping Laravel Controllers Clean with Form Requests

mike knepper
26 Sep 2016
Coding

I've recently been working in PHP and have been very impressed by the Laravel web framework. At first, having only heard horror stories of massive...more.

Automating Your DevOps Infrastructure: Starting from Scratch with Ansible

You've heard of it, but you haven't done it. You know it's where you want to be, but it's not where you are. You know...more.

Better RSpec Stubs

RSpec is a very powerful tool for testing applications. It's been around for a while and provides a rich feature set. One thing that RSpec...more.

What will your legacy [code] be?

The words "legacy code" strike fear into the hearts of developers everywhere. Behind that fear, legacy code means it's slow to understand existing behavior, slow...more.

Refactor and Source-Control Your CI

If you're using Jenkins, then you may have a job that has an "Execute Shell" step to build your project. The contents of that step...more.

Docker as a (workstation) service

kofi gumbs
27 Jul 2016
Coding
Java

Docker promotes itself as "a tool for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications," and there is much literature available to describe...more.

Staying Clean

If you've ever tried cooking a significant meal in the kitchen, then you know things can get pretty messy: pots here, pans there, dirty plates...more.

The Relationship Between Clojure Functions, Symbols, Vars, and Namespaces

Welcome! Often times when working with Clojure newcomers I sense a bit of confusion around the relationship between functions, symbols, vars, and namespaces. Typically the...more.

That's Not a Decorator!

The Decorator Pattern is one of the most abused and misnamed patterns in all of patterndom. It has deep roots in the patterns movement on...more.

Speed up your tests with an in-memory filesystem

You've probably heard about what a unit test is. In fact, you may have even written one or two in your lifetime. Great! If you've...more.

How learning a static language helped me improve my design.

When learning something new, I need to see a lot of details around the subject. I crave something explicit and tangible — and naturally, concrete...more.

Three A's of Responding to Bugs

The head judge of Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, has expressed a simple mnemonic for dealing with customer problems in a restaurant setting. There are three...more.

A Methodical Approach to Dealing With Bugs

Bugs, defects, issues, glitches, hidden features—call them what you want, but inevitably we discover that something in our software system is not working as expected....more.

How to Find a Bug in Your Code

So you’ve got a bug in your code? How in the world do you find the thing? Here are some of the techniques I use...more.

TDD - From the Inside Out or the Outside In?

Often the hardest part of programming is knowing where to start. With test-driven development the right place to begin is with a test, but when...more.

So You Live In Spacetime?

dariusz pasciak
20 Jun 2016
Coding

If you're reading this blog, then you're probably subject to the dimensions of space and time. There is also a good chance that you're a...more.

Go Build Your Own Tools

In building professions as well as software development there is the saying “don't blame your tools.” During a recent project my pair and I were...more.

Baking a Cake with Rails

mike knepper
14 Apr 2016
Coding

In my last post, I cautioned against hastily reacting to the abundance of talks and blog posts describing migrations away from Rails monoliths. A preliminary...more.

How TDD can make your team happier

What makes a software project a joy to work on? Conversely, what can make working on a software project excruciating? For me, I'm the happiest...more.

One Weird Trick That Will Take MINUTES Off of Your Elm Build on Travis CI

rob looby
07 Apr 2016
Coding

If you want to learn the REAL reason your Elm builds are taking so long on Travis CI, be sure to read through to the...more.

Using Functions to Make Better Abstractions

kofi gumbs
16 Feb 2016
Coding

I spent much of my programming youth in object-oriented land, so I grew accustomed to attaching patterns to object-oriented features. In particular, when I heard...more.

Don't Make Me Remember Things

rob looby
28 Jan 2016
Coding
Ruby
Java
Clojure

As a developer there are an infinite number of things to remember: everything from intricacies of the language you’re using to the domain knowledge of...more.

Refactoring as a Feature Tax

Tax season is here. For many of us, that means filing a tax return to see how much money we get back after any excess...more.

Ask DTrace: Why are my tests so slow?

We were in pain. We'd just joined a new Rails project, and the test suite took over 10 minutes to run. I've seen worse, but...more.

Retract with the old, add with the new

How Datomic made me reconsider data Recently I’ve been working on a client project whose data paradigm has opened my eyes to a new way...more.

Entity Framework & Resolving Team Migration Conflicts

zack davy
18 Sep 2015
Coding

I've been working on a .NET project for the past few months. In this project we're using the Entity Framework, which is an ORM for...more.

Internationalize Your Way to Cleaner Code

If your project is localized, it’s probably internationalized. If it isn’t, there’s a good chance it’s not. Depending on your familiarity with those terms, the...more.

Loosely Coupled Tests

Test Driven Development (TDD) has a plethora of benefits, but the one that stands out for me is how it helps to unify a team....more.

Concurrency Control Strategies for Secret Agents

In the 1963 movie "Dr. No," the first in the James Bond series, Bond travels to Jamaica for a case, and he knows that his...more.

Git Disciplined

makis otman
08 Jul 2015
Coding
Tools

In our day to day work, one of the most common tools we as developers use is Git. In a nutshell, Git is a tool...more.

Los Angeles Mastery Cohort Code Katas

micah martin tom kowal tony baik zach olauson javier saldana jayden sung dave moore
12 Jun 2015
Coding
Community
Craftsmanship
Clojure

8th Light's software craftsmen are bonded together by their singular pursuit of mastery. We challenge ourselves constantly to learn and grow through a combination of...more.

Help! I just force-pushed to master! What do I do now?

sandro padin
08 Jun 2015
Coding

Calm down... Let your teammates know. Ask them not to push anything up to master. You can fix this. Jump to the option that best...more.

Alternatives to boolean parameters

dariusz pasciak
28 May 2015
Coding

It is not uncommon to come across a piece of code that looks something along the lines of: void FinalizeOrder(Order order) { // Some code...more.

Handling Exceptions with Middleware in Clojure

mike knepper
19 May 2015
Coding
Clojure

My team was recently tasked with developing a few HTTP endpoints in our Clojure service to be used by a separate UI. The requirements included...more.

Decorators in Ruby

Ruby's low-overhead metaprogramming facilities make it easy to create elegant APIs with minimal effort. As a testament to its power, I can say with a...more.

Mr. Miyagi Teaches Coding

I sat down last night to watch the ’80s movie classic, "The Karate Kid." In addition to being overwhelmed with nostalgia for my childhood, I...more.

Decomposing Asynchronous Workers in Ruby

I'm a proponent of building small, composable pieces over one large piece that does many things. The large piece usually works well, but it eliminates...more.

Using The Option Type Effectively

uku taht
29 Apr 2015
Coding
Java

In a previous blog post, craftsman Dave Torre showed how optional types can alleviate common problems with null values. Bulding on that post, we are...more.

Stack Overflow

doug bradbury
27 Apr 2015
Coding

Let's play a word association game. When I say "stack overflow" what comes to mind? Is it Spolsky and Atwood's popular question and answer site?...more.

Refactoring a Regex

Regular expressions are a powerful way to search through and manipulate text. But as we know from Spiderman, with great power comes greatly reduced readability....more.

Tail Recursion In Clojure

The ability of lisp programs to manipulate themselves is beautiful. When we take into account the amount of the language that is implemeneted by manipulating...more.

The Option Type

dave torre
11 Mar 2015
Coding
Java

I've been writing some Rust recently and have finally had my first experiences with the Option type, a data type that wraps either some value...more.

Functional-ish Ruby, Part 2: Functional Objects

In a previous blog post I discussed a few ways to think about writing Ruby methods from a functional perspective. But in Ruby, or any...more.

Learning from porting selecta

felipe sere
02 Mar 2015
Coding

With the new year I decided it was time to pick up a new language. Having always used high-level languages, I decided to try out...more.

The Cumulative Effect of Inefficient Workflows

In 2009, I started an internship at a Los Angeles-based audio/video post production studio. The audio engineer I was learning from was an avid musician...more.

Single Responsibility Principle: Why Does it Matter?

One of my favorite tips for writing software comes from one of my favorite software role models, Sandi Metz. In her book Practical Object-Oriented Design...more.

Your Test Suite is Useless

dariusz pasciak
12 Jan 2015
Coding

How do you evaluate the health of your test suite? Here are three common symptoms that indicate that your test suite is sick, dead, or...more.

Don't mix test code with production code

dariusz pasciak
19 Dec 2014
Coding

There are many "do's and don'ts" when it comes to testing code. I would like to focus on one of the "don'ts" that comes up...more.

Organizing Your Clojure Environment and Logs with Leiningen

Coming from a Rails environment, one of the things I took for granted was a nice logging setup in which all logs were written to...more.

Mistaking Encapsulation for Abstraction

"Abstract" is a commonly used word in software. I hear it a few times every day. "Can we make an abstraction around this?" "Let's move...more.

How To Be a Terrible Pair

mike jansen
27 Oct 2014
Coding

I heard you got some bad news: your team lead is forcing you to pair on all stories. This sounds grim, but I have a...more.

Hide Your Queries

mike jansen
23 Oct 2014
Coding

One of the quickest ways to turn a well-factored Rails project into an old-fashioned legacy app is to use ActiveRecord where and find_by_sql calls outside...more.

Flaky crusts: Good for pies; bad for test suites

Unit tests that fail intermittently, without exposing any production bugs, are the worst. Like the boy who cried wolf, they reduce our confidence that they're...more.

Tweaking the Varnish Cache

Varnish From the docs, Varnish is a web application accelerator, or a caching HTTP reverse proxy. At its core, Varnish is designed to reduce response...more.

Test-Driving the Game Loop pt. 2

eric smith
14 Oct 2014
Coding

When we last saw our Test-Driven Game Loop, we hadn’t really made it very far, at least in terms of production code. This is what...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: Isolate CSS

When developing software, it's generally desirable to hide the details. This allows you to increase the cohesion of parts in our software, and to decouple...more.

Clojure Stack Traces for the Uninitiated

Clojure is one of my favorite languages, and I love pairing with beginners to share the joy. Learning any new language is a process of...more.

How Long Is Too Long?

dariusz pasciak
11 Sep 2014
Coding

Speed limits exist to encourage traveling at speeds that are deemed safe for a given road. Although the meaning of "safe" will vary per person,...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: Did Java Break My `byte`?

dave torre
10 Sep 2014
Coding
Java

In Java, we use InputStream objects to read data. The smallest amount of data we can read at once is eight bits (one byte), using...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: Setting Date Ranges in Ruby

Yesterday, my pairing partner and I came across an interesting situation. The feature we were working on required receiving some data, constructing a date range...more.

'Convenient' Does Not Necessarily Mean 'Right'

dariusz pasciak
27 Aug 2014
Coding

It is convenient to throw your trash out your car window, but it is not always right. There are exceptions to this. If you are...more.

Functional-ish Ruby

In a recent Apprentice Blog of the Week, Alex Hill detailed one way that we can apply common Ruby patterns to our Clojure code. I’ve...more.

Test-Driving the Game Loop pt. 1

eric smith
18 Aug 2014
Coding

Test Driving an algorithm is a tricky thing. Developers tend to get stuck in one of two ways: They see that they have the algorithm...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: GOOGLEME

This week I experienced first-hand the knowledge ramp-up that is required when joining a project of any real size and complexity. I had actually worked...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: The Dangers of Ruby Gems

Ever since I first began learning Ruby a little over a year ago at The Starter League, I've been wary of using gems. I remember...more.

Prideful Programming

"I won't ask for help again", I told myself. "If I just push a little harder I'll be able to figure it out". Pride is...more.

ClojureScript Faux Pas: Forgetting the Extern

taryn sauer
31 Jul 2014
Coding
Clojure

When immersing yourself in a new programming language, as in a new culture, it’s important to take time to understand the nuances of its common...more.

Abstraction To The Rescue

dave moore
25 Jul 2014
Coding

When I was in high school, I didn’t have a typical job for my age. Instead of waiting tables or making sandwiches, I worked as...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: FormsJs

Working with web forms can be tedious and time-consuming. Many of the tools that exist today require individual setup and handling for each form element....more.

Command Objects Are Gerunds

A gerund—as I often have to remind myself—is a verbal noun. That is, a gerund is a verb being used as a noun. In English,...more.

Diving Into Swift With Swiftest

brian pratt
14 Jul 2014
Coding
Tools

When working in a language that’s new to you, it’s important to spend a lot of extra time making sure you are using the correct...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: Useful Clojure Macros For The Object Oriented Programmer

alex hill
10 Jul 2014
Coding
Clojure

One of the most difficult aspects of learning Clojure for most programmers who have been brought up in the object oriented tradition is the Lisp...more.

Apprentice Blog of the Week: Stubbing Authentication and Authorization in Controller Specs

Controllers are powerful and complicated objects that easily accumulate responsibilities. Even when following the classic Rails convention of "Skinny Controllers, Fat Models," controllers still have...more.

There's an Exception for That

"Stack level too deep?", I asked myself, perplexed. All I did was add a gem and a few lines of initialization code. The gem that...more.

What Good are Strong Parameters?

will warner
05 Apr 2014
Coding
Tools

There are already several eloquent web postings available explaining the Strong Parameters feature of Rails 4. In this post I’ll provide my take on one...more.

Buy the Sandwich, Not the Meal

dariusz pasciak
17 Mar 2014
Coding

Writing good software is hard. Fortunately, we can borrow from our everyday life experiences to make it easier. Consider the following situation: You're sitting at...more.

Combining Clojure and ClojureScript Libraries

ClojureScript is an incredible new project that any Clojurian can appreciate. What could be better than replacing vexing JavaScript with the clean, flowing syntax of...more.

Adding Namespaces To Ruby

A recurring practice of mine these days is to take a feature of a language and see if I can replicate its functionality or likeness...more.

Store Data Not Types

I successfully upgraded a Rails application from version 2.3 to 3.2. Or so I thought. "The Best Laid Plans..." Though I read lots of blog...more.

How I Evaluate Open-Source Software

sandro padin
03 Jan 2014
Coding

There always comes a time on a software project when you need to decide whether to build a feature or use an open-source implementation of...more.

validates_presence_of false

will warner
29 Dec 2013
Coding
Ruby

No doubt Rails is an amazing system. But like anything complicated it has its quirks. I ran across one of these lately as I was...more.

Nested Contexts are Only Kind of Evil

brian pratt
17 Dec 2013
Coding
Tools

If there's anything where opinions amongst my development colleagues differ heavily, it's about the evil of context blocks inside a spec suite. Proponents of nesting...more.

Lispy Elixir

There has been some recent interest in the Elixir language and with good reason, it's an exciting language! Elixir not only brings the power of...more.

Ruby DeRailed: Emergent Data Design

paul pagel
17 Oct 2013
Coding
Ruby

In his talk about Redis at Scottish Ruby Conf a few years ago, Ryan Briones covered the importance of deferring the design of data structures...more.

Test Extraction and Readability

andrew kelly
15 Oct 2013
Coding
Testing

The overt purpose of testing is to ensure that code does what is expected of it, but tests themselves also act as documentation. Highly readable...more.

Modular JavaScript

JavaScript is a complicated language. One of the difficult areas is scope. We can think of scope as the world a particular line of code...more.

Using Katas To Improve

chong kim
26 Sep 2013
Coding
Testing
Tools

Some Background Thoughts There is an experiment from Richard Held and Alan Hein who raised kittens in total darkness. For a short period during the...more.

Test First

I first heard the term "Test First" in 1998. Back then it was part of the phrase "Test First Design". We often shortened it to...more.

Coding fast and coding slow

paul pagel
23 Sep 2013
Coding

When I start a new feature I need to learn what the customer wants, what the code currently does, and how to write new code...more.

Higher-Ranked Types

mark grant
13 Sep 2013
Coding

The Hindley-Milner type system is very powerful: it allows you to express functions with complex type signatures in an elegant, readable way. For example, consider...more.

ActiveRecord Mass-Assignment Order

For over a month, I received occasional reports that an existing feature, adding secondary accounts, wasn't working. I could never reproduce the failure in any...more.

Conditionals Aren’t Evil, Unless You Duplicate Them

We Hate If Statements Many of us have been taught that, in OOP, most of a program’s “if” statements can be replaced by polymorphism. We...more.

Deferred Objects

sandro padin
09 Aug 2013
Coding

A Deferred object is a mechanism for referencing a value which may (or may not) be available at a later point. Every so often you...more.

Limelight Lives - Clojure Toolchain of Choice

I want to tell you about my Clojure toolchain of choice, but in order to do it right we need to go back; way back....more.

Strive for Simplicity

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to pair with Uncle Bob. We were going to pair on a message queue convenience wrapper I...more.

Procedural Polymorphism

Is your code really telling you to use an if statement? As a developer, it is really important to practice your craft. And a great...more.

Idempotent HTTP

Web developers have a habit of taking HTTP for granted because it just works. HTTP works so well that people all over the world exercise...more.

Performing Code Katas

micah martin
28 May 2013
Coding
Clojure

Coauthored by Kelly Steensma Wikipedia defines a kata as a detailed choreographed pattern of movement. Based on the Japanese word meaning "form", katas were originally...more.

Transformation Priority and Sorting

uncle bob
27 May 2013
Coding

January 1 2011 In this post we explore the Transformation Priority Premise in the context of building a sort algorithm. We also explore comic books...more.

The Transformation Priority Premise

uncle bob
27 May 2013
Coding

December 19 2010 This blog poses a rather radical premise. It suggests that Refactorings have counterparts called Transformations. Refactorings are simple operations that change the...more.

Flash - TPP

uncle bob
27 May 2013
Coding

February 3 2011 I read a nice blog today exploring the Transformation Priority Premise using the flash card kata. The author did it in both...more.

Fib. The T-P Premise.

uncle bob
27 May 2013
Coding
Java

February 2 2011 Guilherme Silveira wrote a lovely blog exploring the Transformation Priority Premise using the Fibonacci sequence. He posed a suite of tests similar...more.

Replace Temp with Query in Clojure

colin jones
21 May 2013
Coding
Clojure

Lately I've been re-reading some of the classic books in the clean code / OOP genre and trying to apply their lessons with renewed energy...more.

What is a Bug?

A while back I wrote a little about bugs. I got a few questions and objections and the most common one goes something like this:...more.

When is a character not a Character?

colin jones
11 Apr 2013
Coding
Java

Characters seem like an easy concept to grasp at first glance. , "Java"has a primitive type char and an object wrapper Character, and these are...more.

Stable Sorting in Ruby

will warner
26 Mar 2013
Coding
Ruby

The process of learning Ruby has brought several surprises. Some of which are more pleasant than others. The latest I have encountered is that Array#sort...more.

The Repository Pattern

A recurring theme on the 8th Light blog is decoupling your applications from the implementation of details. A detail can be anything from UI elements...more.

An Open and Closed Case

I awoke this morning to see a twitter conversation about the Open-Closed Principle. The tweeter was complaining that it didn't make a lot of sense....more.

Help Prevent Session Hijacking

adam gooch
01 Mar 2013
Coding
Ruby

Keep your cookies to yourself Browser cookies are a good way to provide a stateless protocol with some memory. Unfortunately, they're also good for hijacking...more.

Riak, MapReduce, and large numbers

myles megyesi
18 Jan 2013
Coding
Tools

The Riak database provides a great MapReduce framework allowing you to execute complex queries, leveraging the parallel processing power of distibuted systems. However, I recently...more.

How to be a great pair

The absolute best code I’ve ever written was when I’ve been most compatible with my pair. It wasn’t that long ago, and I was relatively...more.

Migrating from RSpec Dynamic Mocks to Surrogate - Part 2

eric meyer
13 Jan 2013
Coding
Testing

This blog is Part 2 of a series of blogs about migrating to Surrogate. Part 1 can be found here. If you are unfamiliar with...more.

Migrating from RSpec Dynamic Mocks to Surrogate - Part 1

eric meyer
13 Jan 2013
Coding
Testing

Here's the situation: You use RSpec. You like RSpec. But you want more confidence from your tests than you get with RSpec's dynamic mocks while...more.

How to use rails routing constraints: 2 use cases with code

ben voss
12 Jan 2013
Coding
Tools
Ruby

I’ve been using routing constraints a lot lately. Before I learned about constraints, my controllers were littered with data typing checks and filters, some of...more.

Protect Yourself From SQL Injection

Don’t trust outside data! SQL injection attacks were once considered the greatest threat plaguing the Internet. They continue to be the source of many large...more.

Don't Fail at Failure in Ruby

brian pratt
21 Dec 2012
Coding
Tools
Ruby

Silent failures are difficult to debug -- not only is the error not noisy and obvious, but it can introduce other errors downstream that may...more.

Reflections on Using Backbone.js

cymen vig
13 Dec 2012
Coding
Tools

JavaScript frameworks like Backbone.js can provide the structure missing in ad hoc approaches but there are some common pitfalls. Like many developers today my first...more.

Transformation Priority Premise Applied

micah martin
17 Nov 2012
Coding
Clojure

At SCNA 2012 I entered into a kata battle against Aaron Bedra. The idea was that we'd both perform the Coin Changer Kata live in...more.

Composition over Mixins

eric meyer
16 Nov 2012
Coding

This is not the first post cautioning the use of modules on our blog. However, while I do mostly agree with the points raised in...more.

Taking Password Storage Up A Notch

adam gooch
04 Nov 2012
Coding
Ruby

Protect your users, take password management seriously. There are too many databases in the world with completely unencrypted passwords. Even when databases have encrypted passwords,...more.

Implementing and Testing the Singleton Pattern in Ruby

What is a Singleton Object? The GoF identifies a singleton as a way to "ensure a class only has one instance, and provide a global...more.

Applying DRY to Editing

Editing text can be tedious and mechanical; you are often required repeat the same sequence of commands several times. Keyboard macros are one way in...more.

Welcome To The Gilded Rose (in Clojure)

There's a special sort of satisfication I get from turning absolutely awful code into a well-tested, well-factored program. Not only have I increased the amount...more.

Owning Your Dependencies

Dependencies are nearly unavoidable for non-trivial software projects. These can be large dependencies, such as web frameworks and databases, or smaller decisions, such as pagination...more.

Adapting To Change

justin herrick
18 Sep 2012
Coding

“The only constant is Change.” — Heraclitus While it was doubtful that Heraclitus was addressing developers, the sentiment certainly still applies. As developers, we live...more.

Explicit Collections

Don't extract that method yet! In programming, we tend to work with collections of objects quite often. For example, we may need to check to...more.

C++ is Not Slow

dariusz pasciak
14 Aug 2012
Coding

The last 2 weeks of 8LU were very interesting. Steven Degutis delivered 2 great talks on programming languages, covering the pros and cons of a...more.

The Classic Buffer Overflow

michael baker
03 Aug 2012
Coding

From time to time I solve levels of Smash the Stack for fun. Here's how it works. On each level there's a program with a...more.

Dereferencing NULL Pointer, without a Seg Fault

dariusz pasciak
03 Jul 2012
Coding

We've all heard that Chuck Norris can count to infinity, twice. We've all heard that Chuck Norris can drown a fish. Chuck Norris can divide...more.

What do developers do all day?

dave moore
20 Jun 2012
Coding

Could you (as a software developer) delete all of the code you wrote in a day and rewrite it in around an hour? Chances are...more.

Test Your Rails Application Configuration

A Rails application has many configuration options. Learn how to test one of them. Why? Well, what are the consequences of an improperly configurated application?...more.

On Obsession, Primitive and Otherwise

colin jones
05 Jun 2012
Coding
Clojure

Primitive Obsession is bad stuff. But it's bad, not because primitives are bad, but because obsession is bad. From Merriam-Webster: ob-ses-sion, noun: a persistent disturbing...more.

Be a Relentless Programmer

Before I came to 8th Light, I didn’t write code all the time. I took some CS classes in college and I enjoyed programming a...more.

Quoting Without Confusion

colin jones
22 May 2012
Coding
Clojure

Many Lisp beginners find quoting to be a foreign concept. My own confusions around quote and friends began with my first ventures into Scheme, and...more.

Deliberate Practice

“Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.” — Napoleon Hill We all know the feeling of flow while coding....more.

Polymorphism in Clojure

“polymorphism is a programming language feature that allows values of different data types to be handled using a uniform interface” -Wikipedia In most Object Oriented...more.

Warming Up

Many of us admire other professionals, such as musicians and athletes. We even emulate them in our own profession by practicing. What about that time...more.

Things You Should Know About JavaScript

steve kim
06 Feb 2012
Tools
Coding

I know some people cringe at the idea of writing JavaScript. They opt to write CoffeeScript instead and make every attempt to avoid looking at...more.

Modules called, they want their integrity back

josh cheek
03 Feb 2012
Coding
Ruby

TL; DR Rather than including modules and hooking into .included, write a method that adds the behaviour (even if the method just includes and extends)....more.

The Barbarians are at the Gates

uncle bob
11 Dec 2011
Coding
Java
Clojure

There’s a revolution coming. I wonder if anyone has noticed. It’s not subtle. It won’t be sublime, or easy to integrate. Indeed, it’ll probably muck...more.

Mind Your Own Business Rails

eric smith
09 Dec 2011
Coding

Putting extensive business logic in Rails controllers is bad and you should stop doing it. I suppose I should demonstrate why that's true with an...more.

Why I Pair Program

Recently, I was pairing with Steven. We were wrapping up work on a feature. While reviewing our changes and running our acceptance test suite, he...more.

Three Reasons To Roll Your Own Mocks

josh cheek
28 Nov 2011
Coding

I've spent the last several months writing my own mock objects, but for the code I'm currently working on, we were mostly using RSpec's built...more.

That's Not Yours

eric smith
27 Oct 2011
Coding
Testing

My first exposure to mock objects was in C++, where they are practically indecipherable to the TDD newbie, so I didn't use them. That may...more.

Out of Controller

paul pagel
17 Oct 2011
Coding

In the beginning of using rails it was amazing at how fast everything was compared to my previous java web experiences. I could finally run...more.

Inconsistent APIs Are Costly

Imagine that you're nearing the end of a productive day. Just a little more work to do to finish a feature. Then, your customer calls...more.

Testing Code That's hard to test

josh cheek
01 Oct 2011
Coding
Testing

So if you're like me, you're 5'10" and sport a ruggedly awesome beard. And if you're really like me, you swallowed the T/BDD pill years...more.

Pointers, Schmointers

eric smith
01 Oct 2011
Coding

I'm writing this blog from the train, my head hung in shame. I'm taking a course in Game Optimization and today something exceptionally embarrassing happened....more.

Winning at Consistency

colin jones
10 Jun 2011
Coding
Ruby

Do you use validates_uniqueness_of in Rails? Do you feel confident that it works to prevent duplicate records? If you’re like most of us, you won’t...more.

Fast-Talking ActiveRecord Migrations

Most migrations do very little and run very quickly. Add a column or two; run in a second or two. Other migrations need to do...more.

Clean This Code

eric smith
23 Apr 2011
Coding

If you follow me on twitter @paytonrules you’ve probably seen me griping at various times about writing a testing framework for Objective-C. I’m currently writing...more.

Clojure Mad Science: An Evil Threading Macro Experiment?

colin jones
27 Mar 2011
Coding
Clojure

You are a mad scientist, and you’d like to perform an experiment on your mysterious test subjects. You want half of the subjects to be...more.

Jenkins, RVM, and Selenium

lihsuan lung
02 Mar 2011
Coding
Ruby

I have been working on migrating half a dozen 8th Light projects to our continuous integration server last week. Barring one open-source gem project, most...more.

That‘s Not In My String!

colin jones
02 Feb 2011
Coding
Testing
Ruby

We encountered a strange spec failure today in our continuous integration build. It’s a Rails project, we’re using RSpec, and this was the failing expectation...more.

Clojure Libs and Namespaces: require, use, import, and ns

Whenever I’m showing a newcomer to Clojure how to bring in code from other namespaces, I find myself apologizing that it’s a bit complex and...more.

A Leiningen Tutorial

colin jones
26 Nov 2010
Coding
Clojure

Leiningen, a project by Phil Hagelberg , has become one of the most contributed to Clojure projects, and also one of the most used. UPDATE...more.

JavaScriptness.prototype = new Class( ); From Classical to Prototypal

justin martin
06 Jul 2010
Coding

JavaScript is a very misunderstood language. It has gotten a bad rap because most people that use it don't look for its brighter side. Instead...more.

TDD in education, they're doing it wrong

eric smith
09 Apr 2010
Coding
Testing

This blog post originally appeared on a blog I maintain for my current game development class. Generally speaking my posts over there are pretty specific...more.

Walk and Code

doug bradbury
25 Feb 2010
Coding

A few years ago when we were buying furniture for the first 8th Light office I came across a piece called the WalkStation. It was...more.

Reflection on Hangman

micah martin
04 Oct 2009
Coding

Last week concluded the Hangman Ruby Sparring Tournament. Unlike the previous Battleship Tournament, I put the effort in to write a competitive hangman player (of...more.

Hangman Tournament

micah martin
28 Aug 2009
Coding

Several months ago, I hosted the Ruby Battleship Tournament. It was an all-round fun event where craftsmen sharpened their claws and pitted their skills against...more.

Announcing chiPhone

eric smith
09 Jul 2009
Coding

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the creation of chiPhone, the Chicago iPhone developer’s group, with our first meeting on July 23rd at 6:30....more.

Meta-programming Comes Naturally to Intern

doug bradbury
22 Jun 2009
Coding
Ruby

We have a couple of interns in the office this summer. They are kind of like Jr. Apprentices and are distinguished mostly by the fact...more.

A Functional Refactoring in Scala

colin jones
16 Jun 2009
Coding

Many of us have heard a lot of talk about functional programming and its benefits, especially when it comes to highly concurrent applications where thread...more.

TDD and iPhone—NSTimer

eric smith
11 May 2009
Coding

TDD on the iPhone is a challenging experience, especially when you’ve been spoiled by Ruby like I have been, but it can be done. I...more.

Dependency Inversion Principle and iPhone

While working on the slides for our upcoming talk on TDD for iPhone I asked Eric Meyer why we need the Dependency Inversion Principle. He...more.

Copyrights Conundrum

micah martin
12 Mar 2009
Coding
Ruby

Here’s the situation. You’ve spent days working on an open source project. Your sweat, blood, and tears have been poured into thousands of lines of...more.

Selenium on Rails Released, Again

eric smith
07 Mar 2009
Coding

Quick announcement, Selenium on Rails has been released, now supporting Rails 2.2 and with the latest Selenium Core. Numerous bug fixes are in this release...more.

Embedded Ruby Talks Morse

doug bradbury
09 Jan 2009
Coding
Ruby

I’ve been working with Ruby on embedded systems for a couple of weeks now. The final pieces have fallen into place and I’d like to...more.

Embedded Ruby Sings Sinatra

doug bradbury
30 Dec 2008
Coding
Ruby

Last Time I got ruby up and running on my Arm based embedded development platform. Here is a quick summary of what Santa and I...more.

Embedded Ruby—First Steps

I spent the beginning of my career working on embedded systems for some audio company. These embedded systems were my first love in programming and...more.

Kata: Langston's Ant in Ruby

micah martin
13 Nov 2008
Coding
Ruby

I’ve recorded my Langston’s Ant kata for all to see. This particular kata, with slight variations, has been in front of an audience twice before....more.

Simon

micah martin
10 Nov 2008
Coding

You remember the classic Simon game, right? The one where the electronic devise will blink a color and make a sound that you have to...more.

Limelight 0.3.0 Released

micah martin
05 Nov 2008
Coding

This release of limelight contains many new features and stability. Perhaps most notably, Limelight will no longer eat 95% of your CPU (ouch)! I’m proud...more.

Limelight Tutorial: Tic Tac Toe Example

paul pagel
29 Sep 2008
Coding

Welcome to a Limelight production. I am going to go through a step by step introduction to limelight development using a tic tac toe game...more.

Some Random RubyCocoa stuff

eric smith
23 Jul 2008
Coding
Ruby

I went to WWDC last week 1, and while I was there I got a chance to talk to a couple of their engineers and...more.

Active Record migration dependencies

paul pagel
13 Jun 2008
Coding

We had a new developer join our project recently, and he needed his computer to be setup so he could run the application. “Here is...more.

Code Less: A Language Keystroke Experiment

paul pagel
08 Jun 2008
Coding
Ruby
Java

When I first started writing code in Ruby, it was a breath of fresh air after writing C# code for a year. Ruby had a...more.

Erlang and the OCP

eric smith
24 May 2008
Coding

OCP was defined in 1988 in Bertrand Meyer’s book “Object Oriented Software Construction” as follows: “Modules should be both open (for extension and adaptation) and...more.

Bowled Over by RubyCocoa

eric smith
20 Apr 2008
Coding
Ruby

Last year I wrote a RubyCocoa tutorial that’s been aggregated in a few places and referenced a couple times. By my standards it was an...more.

Rinda and setting up Rindlets

paul pagel
16 Apr 2008
Coding
Tools

Jim Suchy recently laid down some basics of Rinda in his blog Rinda 101. I would like to build on that and talk a little...more.

Rinda 101

jim suchy
11 Feb 2008
Coding
Tools
Ruby

When building a software system composed of multiple decoupled components, the need typically arises for interprocess coordination and communication. As an example, say that we...more.

Want clean code? Stop using the editor.

eric smith
21 Dec 2007
Coding

Recently I was adding some accessors to a ruby class on the fly, and I kept getting confused by a certain code block. The code...more.

Un–Rubify

paul pagel
19 Dec 2007
Coding

Often times while writing meta programming code, I am using the eval function and doing manipulation on method/class/variable names. Today I needed to un–Rubify a...more.

Ruby and the Art of Computer Programming

paul pagel
06 Nov 2007
Coding
Ruby

Recently, I started reading Knuth’s Art of Computer Science. To spice up the exercises, I am writing them out in Ruby. Thinking about the basic...more.

Sockets Enable Multi-Lingual Applications

doug bradbury
04 Nov 2007
Coding
Ruby

As we work with our clients to delivery new features to them quickly and with high quality code, we are finding that the fastest way...more.

Micah's General Guidelines on Ruby require

micah martin
08 Oct 2007
Coding
Ruby

Ruby files have to require other files. There’s no avoiding it. Techniques to manage require statements are numerous and varied. Having tried most of them,...more.

RubyCocoa Tutorial

eric smith
13 Aug 2007
Coding
Ruby

Admit it, you’re new to Rails. You just got your new spiffy Rails job, and they gave you a Mac, formerly the computer of long-haired...more.

Something new, every day

eric smith
26 Jun 2007
Coding

Last December I went to to StarEast in Orlando because my fiancee is a tester and I well, I like sun. While there I picked...more.

Pair Me Up

I am a better pair than solo developer. For me, software is a collaborative art from the start of a project to the end. Starting...more.

Ruby DSL Blocks

micah martin
20 May 2007
Coding
Ruby

There’s a common pattern I’ve seen for developing DSL in Ruby. It’s used in RSpec, the Statemachine Gem, and Unclebob’s Clean Code talk at RailsConf...more.

Lost in Portland, and Thinking

eric smith
20 May 2007
Coding
Ruby

Did I say I was tired yesterday? That wasn’t tired, this is tired. I’m currently training for the marathon, and today I was scheduled for...more.

Day Three At RailsConf

eric smith
19 May 2007
Coding
Ruby

Well it’s day three and I’m exhausted. As you may have noticed I posted at 3 AM last night, and getting up at 8 AM...more.

Day Two At RailsConf

eric smith
18 May 2007
Coding

Hello again from RailsConf. I’ve gone through five presentations. I don’t have any enormous revelations, and no good pictures yet, but I do have some...more.

Test Driving Module Methods

eric smith
03 May 2007
Coding

Recently I had the pleasure and frustration of working the net-sftp gem for Ruby. Pleasure because it’s a well written library, with an easy to...more.

Test, Code, There Is No Step Three!

eric smith
13 Apr 2007
Coding

Occasionally even great developers fall into bad habits, and the rest of us do it more than occasionally. This is especially true when under deadline...more.

Understanding Statemachines, Part 4: Superstates

micah martin
07 Apr 2007
Coding

Often in Statemachines, duplication can arise. For example, the vending machine in our examples may need periodic repairs. It’s not certain which state the vending...more.

Sharing a Database Among Multiple Rails Applications

jim suchy
20 Feb 2007
Coding
Ruby

A sign of the success of Ruby on Rails is the size of applications being written with it. Currently, we are working on a project...more.

Storing Binary Data in Postgres? Beware!

micah martin
18 Feb 2007
Coding

If your situation matches the following conditions, beware! You’re working in rails. You’re using Postgresql. You’re storing binary data in the database. This was the...more.

Understanding Statemachines, Part 3: Conditional Logic

micah martin
12 Feb 2007
Coding

If you’re doing any significant amount of work with statmachines, you will most certainly encounter some conditional logic in your Statemachines. Take our vending machine....more.

Clean as You Code

micah martin
29 Jan 2007
Coding

In my younger days I was a Line Cook at the Olive Garden. In case you’ve never worked in the food industry, Line Cooks are...more.

Three Reasons to Use FitNesse

micah martin
19 Jan 2007
Coding
Testing

Using FitNesse allows you to communicate with the customer up front. Before a line of code is written, you can have all the behavior expressed...more.

Getting started with Rails and FitNesse

paul pagel
15 Jan 2007
Coding
Testing
Ruby

This is intended to be a tutorial to get you started using FitNesse with ruby on Rails. There is some explanation needed about FitNesse, Fit,...more.

Understanding Statemachines, Part 2: Actions

micah martin
29 Nov 2006
Coding
Ruby

Part One demonstrated how to build states and transitions. If you go ahead and add some actions to that and you’ll have a truly useful...more.

Understanding Statemachines, Part 1: States and Transitions

micah martin
17 Nov 2006
Coding
Ruby

I consider Statemachines to be a programming gem. An invaluable tool for the software craftsman’s toolkit. It’s not everyday that a Statemachine comes in handy,...more.

Rails Migrations and Subversion

paul pagel
28 Sep 2006
Coding

In rails, migrations are generated in such a way that they create a numbered migration with an up and a down schema direction. This has...more.

Ruby and Human Compilers

paul pagel
26 Sep 2006
Coding
Ruby

In Paul Graham’s Book, Hackers and Painters, he talks about patterns and Human Compilers. I started to think about how some traditional Object-Oriented patterns are...more.

Pre–Factoring

paul pagel
07 Sep 2006
Coding

Pre–factoring is when you see a piece of code which the story you are working on which has a re–factorings which would make your story...more.

Smalltalk Bowling

micah martin
07 Sep 2006
Coding

I’ve been meaning to learn Smalltalk for years now. Recently Dave Astels and I have a had a few discussion on the topic. They all...more.

IList, IComparable, ICarumba!

micah martin
07 Sep 2006
Coding

This IConvention is an interesting one: “Let’s prefix all interfaces with a capital I.” Who thought of this? Why did they think it was a...more.

Delegates Vs Command Pattern

micah martin
07 Sep 2006
Coding

Delegates: one of the few unique aspects of .NET. How useful are they? Here’s a delegate declaration. The syntax can take some getting used to....more.

Buffer to the Rescue

micah martin
07 Sep 2006
Coding

Recently I was working on FitNesse to solve the problem of large file uploading and downloading. Previously when a file was downloaded FitNesse would happily...more.