Automated Testing

By Aaron Ransley | Published: February 9, 2010

In the spirit of sharing, I’m going to talk a bit about how automated testing has stolen my heart.

I’ve been working with some form of Web development for roughly 7 years now, but have had surprisingly little experience in maintaining a codebase over time. I’ve never liked this fact.

Due to the one-off nature of many freelance projects and personal experiments, there is often little that needs to be maintained or iterated upon after the fact. It’s like a software design utopia; nothing changes. I’ve always been aware of this absurdity and enjoyed it to the fullest, I assure you :)

Now, I work for a company and have a salary and have legacy code to maintain. I also write large amounts of production code, employing nebulous and ever-changing requirements. Sounds more like the software industry, doesn’t it?

This leads me to where I assume many are led: automated testing. I’m learning about unit testing now, but have also touched briefly on integration testing. Most interesting to me so far is the implementation and architecture required to set up test scenarios effectively. Interfaces and DI, oh my! It’s a perfectly well defined example of modular code which feels extremely natural to me.

Coming from a workflow that had me entering data and clicking widgets manually, I actually gain productivity. On top of that, the obvious benefits of overall runtime and structural stability lead to more “confident code”.

Sadly, I still feel resistance from higher-ups regarding unit testing being “too expensive” for small shops, so I am working on compiling citable studies.

Wish me luck :)

Thanks for reading!

Posted in dork out, i'm learnin!, web | 2 Comments

Humanized Output

By Aaron Ransley | Published: February 3, 2010

Shown here is a snippet of the woot! homepage. I enjoy this little widget particularly because of the way excerpts from the forums are prefixed. The human readability of “[user] would like to know…”, “[user] reports back…”, and “[user] had some troubles with a…” is significant.

Go organic with your Web application’s verbiage, especially in areas where users are likely to be in a hurry. “About two days ago” as a timestamp is wildly more helpful than “53 hours ago” or “2-1-2010 6:00 PM”. While it’s no replacement, widgets and primary listings are great places to use a more natural language.

And tomorrow, when I check my schedule and see my next meeting is in “about 3 hours”, I’ll remember. When I am in a hurry I can throw “[blah blah] 7pm tomorrow” at my calender app and it will just work. It feels comfortable, and it encourages smooth interaction.

Posted in dork out, web | Leave a comment

Website Launch: Girlboy Greetings

By Aaron Ransley | Published: January 31, 2010

I’ve just helped design a site for Girlboy Greetings!

Girlboy Greetings is a small greeting card establishment from Los Angeles, CA. The designs are quirky and are offered in a variety of colors. My favorite aspect of the cards is how they offer glimpses of everyday thoughts and places.

geek::facts();

I took a radically different approach with site conception and design in that I put the site together in Photoshop prior to any HTML development. This feels like a graduation from my previous design mentality, which had often sent me bouncing between divsdivsdivs and “oh-god-where’s my vector shape tool”.

The budget was small and time was tight so we went with a small 3 page, primarily static site. A Rails application with only 4 controllers runs the whole thing. The Paperclip plugin is in use by the Card model to handle semi-intelligent cropping of uploaded images. An implementation of a jQuery driven cropper is a to-do. On the front end, all is standard CSS with some basic jQuery effects. Fancybox rounds off the card display.

Posted in dork out, web | Leave a comment

Recommend Reading: Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

By Aaron Ransley | Published: January 29, 2010

Or: Technological Ravings Regarding Production IT Tomfoolery

Lately, a good deal of my time at work has been spent investigating solutions to issues my team and I face as Web developers. Having taken into account our current stack of Windows Server 2003, IIS 6, ColdFusion 8, and MSSQL 2008, various languages and development platforms have  shown promise.

Initially, our collective push was towards Linux. A giant VMWare VSX box @ our server facility could easily spawn any number of headless Ubuntu/Fedora VMs. We could go Rails or Django or Kohana as primary frameworks, and maybe port existing codebases to something like the open-source CFML alternative, BlueDragon.

But that Unix backend, with it’s intimidating shell scripts, and oft-frustrating command line hacking… That’s where not having a UNIX guru on staff hurts. It’s really a show stopper, and in this case it just doesn’t fit.

And so, as of last week, my team and I will be moving to a stack consisting of: Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 for serving, C# for code, and ASP.NET MVC for framework. The reality of money invested in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 license fees; a metric ton of “TSQL spaghetti” codebases to support, and familiarity among team members with administering production servers on the Windows platform makes the choice obvious.

Now, I’m going to turn on rant mode.

I agree — this time — that a move to the Windows stack is easily the more practical. I’ve always been a “Windows is for end-users, Linux is for servers” sort of guy, but I am no Linux server administrator, and can’t take on that responsibility at my place on the workplace “food chain” — I’m just a coder, man!

I am most excited to move away from ColdFusion. After over a year of ColdFusion, I have yet to find it anything more than tolerable. As hilariously uppity that may sound, I mean it in only the most practical way. As of ColdFusion 8, it’s lack of a solid implementation of the ever-powerful “closure” is hard to stomach, CFML is <wordswordswordswords>wordsandwords</wordswordswordswords> verbose, the CFscript alternative is lacking in full functionality, the tags and language conventions promote copy & paste code, and a sane sense of variable scoping is about as present as normality between a couple of hipsters munchin’ on broccoli slaw. Weird.

The future is laden with continuos integration servers, .NET CLR, and miscellaneous DLL fever. A lot to learn, and I love to get engaged in learning something fully. All in all, it’s an exciting time that will hopefully lead to increased satisfaction in daily work among the whole team, the ability to develop in a more structured manner, and of course, the ability to deliver the right Web site on time.

That said, the whole reason I started writing this post — before I got terribly distracted — was to offer my recommendation for an excellent book. Anyone interested in ASP.NET MVC development should check out Pro ASP.NET MVC by Steven Sanderson. It’s written by an extremely knowledgeable and practical author. Basic request flow, in depth convention (and modularity!) explorations, unit testing, deployment, and much more are covered in excellent detail. I would go so far as to say it is a must read for any ASP.NET MVC beginner.

Posted in dork out, i'm learnin!, web | Leave a comment

2010

By Aaron Ransley | Published: January 1, 2010

Welcome to another year! Who knows, maybe I’ll kick myself into gear and start writing on a regular basis. I have this notion, however, that I should be posting about something either:

  • Sort of off the wall existential meanderings or “real deep” subject matter of some sort
  • Highly specialized and educational; technical articles, tutorials, etc

Does anyone still follow my RSS feed on a regular basis? Any thoughts on what kind of content you’d like to come out of the site? Perhaps if I had a set of guidelines it would make it easier to regularly produce some sort of applicable content.

Posted in dork out | 1 Comment