Just A Summary

One of the joys of writing applications using Ruby on Rails is the way the framework is constantly evolving better ways of doing stuff. It’s one of the dangers too.

Each release of Rails brings new and groovy features to the table, so it’s nice to stay close to the edge. However, when you do that, a change in the framework can bring your whole app crashing down because a key assumption you made turns out not to be true any more.

This is especially common when the assumed behaviour is undocumented, or a surprising consequence of behaviour that is documented.

When this happens, your test suite can have failures everywhere; it’s hard to work out precisely what the underlying problem is.

So, what to do?

So, I’m temping now, just another admin worker bee for the council. I can’t say that I’ve found my vocation, but it’s certainly an eye opener.

There is one software patterns book I've read that has The Quality Without A Name in the same way that ??A Pattern Language?? does. That book is ??Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns?? by "Kent Beck":http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?KentBeck. ... ??Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns?? is a complete pattern language, something that I've not seen achieved in any other software patterns book (though Martin Fowler's ??Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code?? gets pretty close.) It's easy to read; full of practical wisdom from someone who knows their stuff and who can explain it phenomenally well.