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Interviews as no-code zones
I wrestled with many new challenges during the last three years, as Head of Engineering at Placemeter building a product and an engineering team from scratch, and one of the toughest ones was hiring. I had little experience initially. How do you get good candidates to even apply at an early-stage startup? How do you decide who to interview? I thought at least I knew
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Lessons on Mobile Platforms from an Ancient JavaScript Game
I recently realized that I’ve been continuously programming in JavaScript for about 16 years. That is, I’ve been writing at least little snippets (and sometimes heaps) of JavaScript at least once a month for 16 years. 16 years! That’s insane. That’s a much longer run than I’ve had with any other language, and it doesn’t look
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Robolectric 2.2: Some Pages from the Missing Manual
When I have a conversation about Android development with anyone I usually end up complaining about how hard and annoying testing is. I think Google did a huge disservice to the community by neglecting testing infrastructure since as a result there is no culture of testing in Android development. There are some open source efforts
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The Test-Infected Programmer’s Android Apothecary
Earlier this week I gave a lightning talk about testing at an Android meetup in New York. Because, on the surface, testing is not the most exciting topic in the world, I tried to spice it up with a snazzy title and a slightly gimmicky structure. The jury is out whether it worked or not
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Failure Notifications for Rake Tasks on the Heroku Scheduler
For users of Heroku, the Scheduler add-on is a convenient and cheap way to run scheduled batch jobs. However, you get what you pay for: it’s a little bare bones. For example, it doesn’t support any sort of notifications when a job fails, a major issue unless you compulsively check your logs. For Rails apps
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Multiple Delegates in Ruby
I found that, out of the box, delegating method calls to multiple objects is not straight-forward in Ruby. There are two modules in the Ruby standard library that cover most delegation use cases: The delegate module lets you easily delegate all methods to another object, and the forwardable module does the same for some explicitly enumerated methods. Both
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Robust Parameterized Unit Tests in Ruby with param_test
Parameterized unit tests come in handy when you have a simple API that you want to test in the same way with multiple inputs and expected outputs. Instead of creating duplicates of a test with small variations, it’s often nicer to have a single test that runs multiple times with different parameters – a parameterized
Salt Mines
Tales of Electronic Drudgery
Salt Mines 