Sterling Rose Design Blog

I don’t consider myself a designer – I self-identify as a developer – but since I’m the only coder on most of my projects, I have to fake it sometimes. Over the years, I have bookmarked a lot of sites that I find more useful than others in doing the design work. They include:

* Bazaar Designs – Links to incredibly rich, detailed stock photos and really unusual font choices available for download and use, as well as great tutorials and blog entries on other subjects, like CSS and AJAX.
* COLOURlovers – Suggestions of color palettes to use for site designs, plus downloadable tiling patterns.
* Da Button Factory – Generate custom buttons on the fly for use in your applications.
* Dry Icons

In my project, I have orders, and each order can have an unlimited number of line_items. Line_items are created by the user clicking on a button, which appends (via RJS) a new row to the line_items tabled form. So far, so good.

But I needed the extended price (quantity * price_per) of each line_item to be calculated every time the user tabbed out or clicked away from the price_per field. Further, I needed the subtotal, tax, total, and balance fields to be automatically re-calculated.

I messed around with it for several hours, trying Javascript, Prototype, and even jQuery, before I finally settled on a Prototype approach that worked. The real struggle was that using Rails 2.3’s nested forms functionality meant that each line_item would have an index key embedded in the middle of the text field’s name and id, and I could not come up with a good way to extract it, to pass it to the Javascript function.

Luckily...

I’m not sure if there used to be an assert_include method or not (I’ve seen some references to it, but can’t find it anywhere in the Rails API), but I found a workaround.

I have a Color model, and I want the :index action to only show those colors whose deleted value is set to false (it’s more or less what the acts_as_paranoid plugin did/does). My test for the :index action looks like this:

test "should get only colors that are not deleted" do
  first_color = Color.create(:name => 'Blue', :deleted => false)
  second_color = Color.create(:name => 'Red', :deleted => true)
  get :index

  assert_response :success
  assert_not_nil assigns(:colors)
  assert_equal true, assigns(:colors).include?(first_color)
  assert_equal false, assigns(:colors).include?(second_color)
end

There may be other ways to do this (and I certainly wel...

On a whim, I asked (in IRC and via Twitter) what order – given validators, accessors, and associations – developers typically listed these components in their models. As far as I know there is no compelling reason to use one order over the other (but feel free to correct me in the comments). Even so, it can be fun to know what other developers do.

I had 19 responses, broken down as follows:

Accessors | Associations | Validators = 20%
Accessors | Validators | Associations = 5%
Associations | Accessors | Validators = 20%
Associations | Validators | Accessors = 45%
Validators | Accessors | Associations = 5%
Validators | Associ...

I was fortunate to run into Ray Hightower as we both left the TDD BoF at 10PM one night. I was pretty wiped out by that point, but was still excited to find out that I was talking to the man behind Windy City Rails.

We had a great discussion on our way to the elevators, about conferences and how to get more women in attendance at them. I mentioned one thing that had come out in the Women in Rails panel as a suggestion: childcare at events. I am of the opinion that having childcare available at conferences, workshops, and other events will be a huge win for families in general, and perhaps women in particular. Ray was very enthusiastic about the idea, and actually followed through on researching childcare alternatives for WCR!

The Westin – which is host...

I am a martial artist, and try to train either body or mind every day.

Today I was reading a page from Bow to Life: 365 Secrets From the Martial Arts for Daily Life and the lesson really struck home for me in terms of my work with RailsBridge.

(Beginners are) your opportunity to participate and bring more goodness into life. Beginners let you empty your cup while filling theirs. They are life’s way of vaulting you to higher consciousness and better living.
…
Look for opportunities to share your expertise with others. Treat each opportunity as a learning experience for yourself. Ask yourself why life has sent you this particular person at this special time. What aspect of sharing your expertise is connected to your o...

I was spinning up a brand new client website that would (like most websites) include a copyright footer. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t have to come back year after year and update the year span, so here is what I used:

&copy; 2009<%= "-#{Date.today.year}" if Date.today.year != 2009 %> ABC Company

It will display only 2009 as the copyright year until January 1, 2010, then it will start displaying a span (from 2009 through the current year). Simple.

Uses Rails 2.3.2

RailsConf was inspiring on so many levels, it would be almost impossible to try to cram it all into one blog entry, so I won’t even try. So for this entry, I want to talk about what I took away from the event in terms of being a female developer in an industry that is overwhelmingly male in its constituency.

Before about three weeks ago, I didn’t really think about it much. I was a “coder who was female”, not a “female coder.” The “girl” part was at best incidental. I mean, sure, I knew that I was in the minority in the #rubyonrails IRC channel, but it was a non-issue for the most part. Now, I’m more conscious.

There were about 40 female and about 1100 male attendees at RailsConf 09. That’s a ratio of about 3.6%. I saw and heard (via the #railsconf IRC channel) plenty of guys call it a “sausage-fest.” And it was. Now I’m not abou...

I just finished attending my first-ever RailsConf in Las Vegas, NV. It was an amazing experience that I’ll be blogging about a lot over the next coming days. I wanted to make my first post on the subject be a (long – sorry) list of tips and advice in case you ever plan to attend a similar event yourself. If you have tips of your own that you’d like to share please feel free to drop them in the comments section!

1. Bring lots of business cards. One of the greatest benefits of attending a conference of any type is the contacts you will make, and it’s easier for them to remember who you are and keep in touch if they have your contact information.


2. Take care of your feet. There is a lot of walking and standing, and the days are quite long. Wear very comfortable, well-padded shoes. Put your feet up when you can. If you can find a place to unobtrusively take your shoes of...
   

Over the last couple of weeks, a motivated group of people took the See a need, fill a need approach to development in general, and the Rails development community in particular. The needs we saw were:

a) Make a concerted, focused effort to encourage a sort of “culture of kindness,”
b) Promote a “give back” mentality by developing applications in Rails for non-profit organizations,
c) Support greater inclusion of all kinds of minorities, and
d) Provide a wealth of documentation, mentorship, and instructional material to new developers.

With those objectives in mind, we have launched RailsBridge. Our guidelines are pretty simple:

* First, do no harm. Then, help where you can.
* Bridge the gap from aspiring developer to contributing community member, through mentoring, teaching, and writing.

I’ve been using timeboxing for a little over three weeks now, off and on, and I continue to find it a very useful technique for my own working environment.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone at Macmation about their product, TimeBoxed.

TimeBoxed was designed to be extremely simple to use.
Each of its features has been carefully designed and configured to adhere to the core mission of this application.
In fact, many features were discarded because they just couldn’t live up to our stringent mission requirements.
The result is an application that does exactly what you need, the way you need it.

The install went off without a hitch and took about 30 seconds after the download.

Read the whole post...

 <table>
   <% @users.each do |u| %>
     <tr id='user_row_<%= "#{u.id}" %>'>
       <td><%= link_...

		

<%= form.label :time_zone, "Time Zone" %>
<%= time_zone_select :time_zone, @user.time_zone, nil, :default => 
  "Pacific Time (US & Canada)" %>