A few weeks ago we start experimenting with Git for Rails development.

I am not going to highlight the all of the advantages of using git here, but let me mention that Git is one of the few SCM out there that really understands merges.

As Linus, the creator of git, says "in this thread":http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/archives/git/0504/2182.html
bq. "The important part of a merge is not how it handles conflicts (which need to be verified by a human anyway if they are at all interesting), but that it should meld the history together right so that you have a new solid base for future merges.
In other words, the important part is the trivial part: the naming of the parents, and keeping track of their relationship. Not the clashes.
And it looks like 99% of SCM people seem to think that the solution to that is to be more clever about content merges. Which misses the point entirely."

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Source: Mike Riley

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From the start, I have to warn you that this melodramatic title may not have been terribly well considered. When Shelley asked me what my talk at 2 was going to be, I responded in rather a flustered manner without thinking through the ramifications. I think a sense of rather foolhardy bravado may have seeped into the name of the talk, and I am not ashamed to admit that.

Not wanting to disappoint, I wracked my brain for Actionscript 3 scenarios which could relate to the theme of Dragons. No luck. Cursing the English Literature degree that had seemingly created this intractable situation, I got to work on the talk.

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Things are alway rather busy here, everyone working away on our various projects. It can sometimes be hard to spend a bit of time getting back to our roots and hacking away on stuff which is not related to our work. It is even harder to share this knowledge with everyone when it has no bearing on the task at hand.

With this in mind, we have been trying out a new scheme in New Bamboo Towers to encourage sharing of all those crazy gems of knowledge we discover in our own time. Thus the "Talk at 2" came into being (Damien has suggested "talk@2" but this seems a little 2002 to me). On Friday afternoon, one member of the team presents something that they find particularly interesting, and that other people might not be familiar with. It can be related to anything really, but usually has an element of programming in it.

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So client worked has kept me too busy to write up the second part of my "mocking":http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2007/2/25/defining-interfaces-through-mocking tutorial. Part two is coming along nicely... Honest guv'nor and describes some advanced mocking strategies but it's taking a bit longer to write than I anticipated. In the meantime I'd like to explain a little more about behavioral driven design. As there is one particular thing I find I'm constantly asked with regards to BDD and mocking and it's driving me nuts explaining it all the time, so listen up BDD nay sayers.

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We need great senior software engineers!. For more details take a look at the "SVN Job board":http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1799

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W00t! IM IN URZ COOKERZ BAKIN UR CAKEZ!

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For all those people making Rails apps in Textmate, here's a little thing that I've suggested to other people in the office recently. It affects people like me, who generally cd into my rails app and run mate . to open up the entire thing in everyone's favourite editor. The problem in this situation, which most of us have encountered at one point or other, occurs when doing a find in project. There is a certain sinking feeling you get as you press the find button, and at that exact moment, realise that the log and tmp directories (which have been accumulating in size over the last month) are gonna be searched as well. The ball starts spinning and there's nothing you can do...

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Well it's that time of the year again and we've got a few more vacancies for Ruby on Rails developers. If you'd like to work on some of the hottest start ups and with a young/vibrant team then maybe you'd like to come work for us!

We're hiring across the board from juniors just out of univeristy to seniors with years in the web industry.

For all applicants we'd expect the following:

• Experience developing web applications
• Scripting/programmer experience of some kind
• You like using Macs
• You're comfortable in a Unix environment
• Good OO knowledge
• At least 6 months experience with Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails
• An eye for detail

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