Peter Marklund's Home

Over at the MyNewsdesk developer blog:

• Migrating RSpec to Mocha

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More good stuff from the MyNewsdesk Developer Blog:

• PostgreSQL Unreliable Default Sort Order and Random Rails Test Failures

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Two new posts from the MyNewsdesk Developer Blog:

• Rails 2.3.2 Bug - Sending Multipart Email Breaks When Current Directory is not RAILS_ROOT
• Enabling/Disabling the Rails Cache

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As part of an ongoing effort to offload out database at MyNewsdesk I have released a new Rails plugin called Cachable Model. The plugin is similar to an older plugin called Cached Model in that it basically caches primary key id lookups for ActiveRecord models. The Cachable Model plugin has an extra feature that lets you cache lookups by other unique columns as well. Here is an example:

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Now that I'm back working at Newsdesk I've started posting in our developer blog again:

• Configuring Exception Handling in RSpec and Controller Tests
• acts_as_bitfield Plugin now Radio Button Compatible
• Rails I18n and 404/500 Error Pages

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Fred Brooks is a Computer Science professor who managed 5000 man-year IT projects at IBM in the sixties. His words carry a lot of weight and he certainly has something profound to say about software engineering. The central theme of the book is that of conceptual integrity. It's about the need to have a single architect, a master mind, who oversees all development and makes sure all the parts fit together. "A clean, elegant programming product must present to each of its users a coherent mental model of the application". The ideal scenario for conceptual integrity naturally is having a single programmer. The problem is that some systems are so big that in order to finish them before they are obsolete you need a large number of developers. Much of the book is spent discussing this difficult problem. How do you organize huge developer teams?

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