Development Posts

Sandi Metz explained her 5 rules (and why they matter) at Future Talk at New Relic on Monday the 24th.

Continue Reading

Justin Weiss posted a great article on how you can add quick and easy filtering for Rails models without bloating your controllers or models beyond adding scopes here

Continue Reading

Entering the field as a Junior Developer can be intimidating. Here are a couple of experiences I found important in my preparation to making the transition into full time development.

Continue Reading

In the past year or so, the front-end developers at Planet Argon have taken more of a modular approach to writing CSS. This means writing CSS in a way that promotes forward-thinking, scalability, and ease of development. Before I get into the pros and cons, here’s a quick example of the difference between a modular and non-modular approach.

Continue Reading

Today I’m concluding the series of interviews with Epicodus students! I got the chance to talk to Mac Eisenberg who is a native to Brooklyn, NYC. He came out to Portland from New York and is loving it.

Continue Reading

Welcome to round two of interviews with Epicodus students! Today we’ll talk with Hunter Meyer, a developer from Orlando, FL who loves Ruby on Rails.

Continue Reading

Throughout this week I’ll be posting my interviews with three students from local code school, Epicodus. They’ll talk about their experiences with the program and how they have been growing as web developers in the past few months.

With the emergence of of code schools in recent years, it can be hard to keep track of them all. Which ones should we be paying attention to as potential employers or students? I wanted to delve a little deeper and take a look at how current students felt about the program.

Today we hear from Braden O’Guinn and his experience with Epicodus.

Continue Reading

After an OS X upgrade from 10.8 to 10.9, I noticed some previously-passing Capybara specs were failing. The failing specs all shared a similar structure:

  it 'should show some text in the 2nd tr' do
     visit some_path
     page.should have_selector('tr:nth-child(2)', text: 'some text')
  end

Notice nth-child pseudo-selector; this seemed likely to be involved as other specs using have_selector with plain class selectors continued to pass.

I applied a number of patches that folks seem to be performing on their new 10.9 installs (installed XCode 5.0.1 and then dev tools via xcode-select --install, running brew updates, etc) and nothing changed. What led me to a solution was this Nokogiri Github issue from the Mountain Lion release:

https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/742

I ran one of my failing specs with the DYLD_PRINT_LIBRARIES=1 flag mentioned in this issue:

dyld: loaded: /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
dyld: loaded: [repo]/vendor/ruby/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.6.0/ports/x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0/libxml2/2.8.0/lib/libxml2.2.dylib

As the issue suggests, I added a reference to Nokogiri directly below Rails in my Gemfile (it did not have an explicit reference in the Gemfile before this). After that, I see this load order:

dyld: loaded: [repo]/vendor/ruby/1.9.1/gems/nokogiri-1.6.0/ports/x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0/libxml2/2.8.0/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
dyld: loaded: /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib

With the libxml dylib loaded first from the bundled Nokogiri, my specs pass again.

Continue Reading