Musings of a startup junkie and Ruby on Rails nerd.

Welcome to Millarian! I write about web development, Ruby on Rails, consulting, and the occasional startup lesson learned the hard way.

Firefox Profiles

Using Firefox profiles to separate your development extensions from personal browsing

code how-to

Gravatar Problems

Debugging and fixing the Mephisto Gravatar caching plugin for production use

rails ops

Striving for 100 percent

Weighing the practical value of 100% code coverage versus focusing testing on high-impact functionality

testing code

Rails Testing Tips: Testing a helper with a block

Two approaches to testing a Rails helper method that accepts a block using RSpec

rails testing how-to

Rails Testing Tips: Stubbing controller methods in a helper test

In RSpec helper tests, the controller context is self -- use self.stub! to mock controller methods

rails testing how-to

iBug

Firebug for the iPhone -- a small webserver that forwards log messages to the Firebug console

code how-to

Nads: My First Firefox Extension

Building a Firefox extension that hides ads on web pages using XUL and JavaScript

javascript code

Userstamps

Automatically recording created_by and updated_by user IDs on ActiveRecord models

rails how-to

Migration Timestamps deleted_at Magic Field

Extending Rails migration timestamps to automatically include a deleted_at column for acts_as_paranoid

rails how-to

Meeting the Users

Spending a day observing users in their environment and discovering needs we never anticipated

code business