I recently returned from the Pragmatic Studio's Test-Drive Development with Rails studio. I've been to several Pragmatic Studios, and have come to expect very high quality instructions from people who know what they're doing and are actually using the stuff they are teaching - the TDD studio definitely lived up to my expectations. The instructors were Joe O'Brien and Jim Weirich (of rake, rubygems, and flexmock fame).

I'm a bit ashamed to admit I have not been much of a tester in my Rails development thus far. I've always recognized the value behind testing, but just hadn't had the impetus to really get me going. The main reason for me attending this studio was to provide the kick in the ass to get me started with testing... and it succeeded.

The first two days covered traditional Rails unit and functional testing, while the third covered rspec. The best parts, in my opinion, were the pair-programming live code demos put on my Joe and Jim. In the demos, Joe would write the test while Jim would implement the code for that test. It really cemented in my mind the idea behind Red (initial failing test), Green (passing test), Refactor (cleanup and refactor code).

We also covered some other really cool technologies like cruisecontrol.rb (a tool for continuous integration) and Selenium and FireWatir (tools for automating testing in the browser).

Now that I've seen some real-life TDD, I'm looking forward to incorporating it into my own development practices.

Hi, I'm Chris, your friendly neighborhood Ruby on Rails programmer. For the last 10 years I've moonlighted as a freelance web developer, spending my evening and weekends coding and designing, while also holding down full-time jobs. Most recently I've been employed by George Washington University, where I've worked full-time as a web developer for the past 2.5 years. Today was my last day at GW, and is also my last day as moonlighting freelance developer.

Why the big changes? I've accepted a position at Intridea, a DC-based Ruby on Rails development shop. Though I enjoyed my time at GW, and my many late nights of coding for my freelance business, I'm really looking forward to focusing all my efforts toward building Intridea. I've already been chatting with some of the guys there, and I know I'm going to learn a lot, because they're all really sharp. I'm also going to be able to play with cutting-edge Rails stuff that I've wanted to take for a whirl - stuff like unobtrusive javascript, Amazon Web Services, sass, and Rspec (among others).

Making the leap is helping to kickstart a few other projects that I've been putting off for a while. This blog, for one. I've been meaning to put this blog together for almost a year now, constantly having ideas that made me say "hey, I should blog about that." Now I have a place to do that. I'll be cross-posting some of the more technical articles on the Intridea blog, but some of the content here will be unique. I hope this blog will eventually be a good place for Rails tips, tricks, and wisdom, though you'll have to be the judge of that!