Goodbye exception_notifier and a cluttered inbox! Kudos to Thoughtbot for rolling out hoptoad: the app error app. It’s a web service that your app can talk to in order to report 500 (server) errors.

It was a snap to configure and has a simple plugin you can download once you register. You can add hooks to Lighthouse or other bug tracking software. Not sure how to do this yet, but it’s awesome to see a great execution on an app that solves a problem.

I recently wanted to share RSpec examples with a business user. For some reason, it was kind of hard to find information on how to get a nice listing of all the examples present in your system. I believe Text and HTML formats are available, but I was unsure about how to pass spec command line options to the rake task.

This is how to get it done. On the command line from your Rails project’s root:

  rake spec SPEC_OPTS="--format s -c"

This is a great way to validate a data model in plain English.

Not using RSpec? I highly recommend using it or a comparable framework to use business language as a definition for technical tests. Remember, if you follow Agile methodologies, you’ll want to test before you implement any features.

Are you interested in learning more about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and RSpec? Check out Peepcode’s screencast.

Take A List Apart’s annual survey. I’m a huge fan, and the results are usually compelling!

Fast and Easy Selling. That’s what we set out to make happen last quarter. Well I’ve been very busy over the last few months. I’m very proud to present Gazelle.com. The team has been working incredibly hard, and the development effort shows in the quality of the release. We’ve relaunched the service under a new brand (we were formerly under the guise of Second Rotation), and I can’t describe how pleased I am with the results.

I talk about it in depth on this blog - what makes a good Engineering team? After this effort, I would say balance, efficiency, and determination. All the skills of the team really came into play here. The group all went above and beyond to make sure that this release was a huge success. I’d like to thank Thos Niles, our product manager, Jason Wadsworth, our architect, Graham Babbitt, our front end developer, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, Brian Kaney, our development consultant, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, and James McElhiney, our CTO. Their efforts exceeded all expectations.

We’re currently hiring and we’re always on the lookout for solid developers. Right now, we’re focused on finding a project manager and a release engineer. Take it from me, this is a stellar group to be involved with.

There’s so much learning in how this project went. When things calm down a bit, I’ll be sure to post more about the specific knowledge gained from a development process perspective.

So I’m thoroughly annoyed that a fieldWithErrors div wraps around a field that fails validation. I added a file called field_with_error_fix.rb in config/initializers to solve this pesky problem. It has the following code:

ActionView::Base.field_error_proc = Proc.new { |html_tag, instance|
"<span class=\"fieldWithErrors\">#{html_tag}</span>" }

Goodbye inappropriate divs!