Always keen to keep in touch with the vibrant Ruby community in the UK, last night I attended the latest installment of the Ruby in London meetup, hosted by Oliver Bernard at Mindful Chef's beautiful office. There was a great turnout, plentiful pizza, lovely snacks (by Mindful Chef, of course) and a choice of cold beverages. I enjoyed ...

Here's a tip for speeding up your Rails system test suite. You may well have a test helper to authenticate a user before continuing with your actual test. Something like this is typical: Instead of authenticating in every system test like this, it's possible to directly set a session cookie, saving a few steps in the process. Here's ho...

The code I write is going to be legacy code in 5 years time. In 10 years time it’s unlikely to still exist. And if it does, in 20 years it probably won’t be runnable on computers of that day. One day I won’t work at 37signals. I hope that I will for a while yet of course, but one day I won’t. One day I won’t be here. I’m temporary. So ...

Before joining 37signals I hadn't encountered Puma-dev. This post is a message to past-me who would have benefited from using it to develop a constellation of Ruby on Rails applications. A pretty typical setup for an organisation with a Ruby on Rails monolith is to at some point start breaking it up. Examples of Rails apps that may be ...