Jean-Philippe Boily / @jipiboily

Rails developer. I say things. I write things.

RSpec: top failing specs report

  |  Jean-Philippe Boily  |  

You just made a big change that broke a lot of tests and you would love to know which specs have the most failing tests? That gist shows you an output sample and then the code you need to add in a new file in your spec/support:

Please note that if you have a shit load of failing tests, that will work better with some custom RSpec formatter like Fuubar.

Go fix your tests now!

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Monologue 0.2.0 and monologue-markdown 0.2.0 released!

  |  Jean-Philippe Boily  |  

You know what is Monologue, right? It is a basic blogging engine built as a Rails mountable engine and has few dependencies to make it easy to embed in an already existing Rails app. You can also use it in a brand new Rails app! It has few features but it is easy to extend.

Monologue 0.2

What are the new features? Here they are (from the CHANGELOG:

  • IMPORTANT: add cache management config and UI. Please review the new config options!
  • first extension available: monologue-markdown
  • add tags
  • add a UI to manage current user's account (welcome in 2012, you can now change your password!)
  • add RSS icon
  • add social icons
  • add Gaug.es tags
  • there is now a sidebar: you can put the latest posts, tweets or whatever you want! Kinda simple system but efficient enough for now. Included: tag cloud, categories (tag), latest posts and tweets.
  • front page articles are now more cleverly truncated
  • a few Deface hooks (data-monologue attribute) were added to the admin layout (for the menu)
  • update admin UI with newest...
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Rails Rumble and Wizenews: idea and fails

  |  Jean-Philippe Boily  |  

As you might know, I worked with three guys on a hackaton last weekend: Rails Rumble. We had 48 hours to build an app. We had a lot of fun! That was my first real hackaton and most probably not the last one. Let's see how we did.

The idea

What I had in mind (when I was alone in the team) was:

  • import your Google Reader feeds
  • read your news (huh!)
  • be able to vote and comment on news, those votes and comments being public and seen by everyone for a single news item
  • have a "trending" section

That was not the initial plan, but a stripped version of the full idea. What we ended up building is something buggy, not really usable for me right now and missing the key features I want. Let's be honest!

The long-term idea would be to have a news aggregator smart enough to show me the news that I am interested in, the most popular, but also the most commented. A place where I could comment, vote up & down news too. It would make it easier to point to what's "important"...

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Wizenews: almost 24 hours old

  |  Jean-Philippe Boily  |  

Rails Rumble has started around 21 hours ago. What are we up to? Here is the objective (from our Rails Rumble page):

Wizenews is a simple news reader. You import your Google Reader feeds and then you can participate in a more public manner to those news by voting them up & down and commenting on them, right from Wizenews!

We'll try to add public space where trending news and topics could be browsed by anyone. That said, not sure that part will be 100% done by the end of rumble! :)

Maybe more if time and resources permits...we have a lot more ideas!

So, are we almost ready? Hell no! We faced a few problems. As our team didn't plan that much, I was almost certain we would face a few problems. Our project is using Google Reader heavily, but had no time to test any library neither OAuth2! Both were problems, but mainly OAuth2 in fact! For now, OAuth is on-hold, we'll figure out later a fix! Besides that, things are going smoothly. Our latest additions to the team helped us a...

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From zero to full team and project idea (Wizenews) in a week

  |  Jean-Philippe Boily  |  

Last week I decided to register to Rails Rumble. I had no idea what would be my project at first. I had a few ideas but still was alone and not sure of what would be my project yet. I've invited a friend and ex-coworker, Alex, earlier this week and we did a planning session, short & sweet. There was no doubt, we would build Wizenews.com

Then I posted yesterday on my blog a retrospective of the process. Since then, two new members joined the team. GeekOnCoffee, a guy I've met at first Spreeconf in February and talked quite a bit in the last few months due to my work with Spree (he's from the Spree core team). He asked if we were full. He can't work full-time during the weekend, but hey, we'll have fun! And then Frank Bernier, another ex-coworker asked if we were full just a few hours before we started. He can't work full-time either, but hey, we'll have fun! Everyone joined, we're full!

Team Wizenews

So, now that we're full, have an idea that...

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