Tammer Saleh

Just to prove the theory that every incredibly incomprehensible piece of code you come across is probably your own, I penned a quick svn blame vim command.

vmap gl :<C-U>!svn blame <C-R>=expand("%:p") <CR> \| sed -n <C-R>=line("'<") <CR>,<C-R>=line("'>") <CR>p <CR>

Just highlight the disgusting code in question, and bask in your own shame!

The past three weeks have been a total whirlwind of excitement, glamour, drinking, more glamour, sickness, boredom, and a bit more glamour.

I gave a presentation on BDD with shoulda for Mountain West Ruby Conf in Salt Lake City (video above).

It must be nice to live in a city completely surrounded by gorgeous snow capped mountains. And the library where the conference was held was an incredible example of architecture. Lots of sweeping curves and generous amounts of glass.

After that, it was off to present at Scotland on Rails. I’ve never been to a city as thoroughly beautiful as Edinburgh. It seemed like every street was lined with buildings older than my own country.

I’ll be putting the shots I took for both of these trips up on my flickr account as soon as I have time to unload them.

Unfortunately, I fell under the grips of a serious cold at the end of that trip, and just finished recovering last weekend. So now it’s time to get back up to speed.

I’ll be in New York next weekend for GoRuCo, Brisbane on the 9th for some personal time, San Diego on the 23rd for more of the same, Portland on the 29th for RailsConf, and Portland again in July for OSCON, where I’ll be giving a 3 hour tutorial on advanced ruby metaprogramming.

In fact, I’ve got so many trips planned this season, that I’ve started using Dopplr to keep track of them. Check out my profile and itinerary in the sidebar, stage left.

And I promise to get back to more technical posts as soon as the dust settles.

Like most kids out there, I’m a follower of the GTD system. I’ve gone through a bunch of GTD software and have boiled it down to a combination of Backpack and a pad of paper in my hip pocket.

I thought I’d share a script I wrote that emails me my list of todo items every morning.

@daily /usr/local/bin/ruby /home/tsaleh/bin/email_todos.rb 

I’d like to announce the launching of a small side project of mine:

Politiquotes

A political awareness app where you can post, vote on, and discuss quotes from your favorite candidates.

So join up and get your quote on!

Crossposted from GiantRobots

Shoulda is a great tool for cleaning up your tests, but there was always some dirt under the hood that was keeping me up at night. I don’t want to just move complexity around – I want to remove it entirely.

A recent change in edge rails forced me to get off my butt and do that.

So everyone give a warm hello to the latest Shoulda gem. It now uses a Context class in the backend, prints out should_eventually tests in a clear way, names the bare shouldas nicely, and fixes a few small bugs.

I also took the opportunity to fix some of the outstanding issues in the shoulda rails plugin (with a lot of great help from the community).

So grab the latest plugin and have some fun:

piston install https://svn.thoughtbot.com/plugins/shoulda/tags/rel-4.0.1 vendor/plugins/shoulda

Also, please let me know if you find any bugs or issues.

I’m totally psyched to say that I’ve been invited to speak at Scotland on Rails. I’ll be in the company of some truly amazing ruby developers, and I highly recommend that you reserve your ticket now. Who can resist a conference in site of an ancient scottish stronghold? Or, more to the point, who can resist the scotch?

I’ve also been invited to speak at the Mountain West Ruby conference alongside speakers like Philippe Hanrigou and Jeremy McAnally. There are a lot of talks at this one that I’m excited about seeing – especially the ones on Datamapper and CouchDB.

So if you’re at either of those conferences, then please drop by and say hi. And, yes, I’m just as fuzzy as my picture in real life.