Articles by Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

Start Testing Your Migrations. (Right Now)

Migrations are a necessary part of any Rails project. At some point, you need to modify the structure of your database, normalize data that exists within those tables, or refactor the architecture entirely. The migrations for these tasks can vary in complexity from simple “add_column” statements to extreme SQL with nested joins and subselects. To

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

The Socratic Method and Agile: Why we should question everything.

Like many agile shops, here at Carbon Five we use Pivotal Tracker to manage our stories. Stories are estimated and prioritized within typical “Current”, “Backlog”, and “Icebox” queues. Stories can be labelled to give them context, and one label I have seen applied to stories has gotten me thinking Greek. This label is a word

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

Stellar theme for Rubymine

Being a VIM junkie, I have an affinity for dark themes and fluorescent syntax highlighting. After switching to RubyMine + VI emulation, I decided to put together this theme to mimic the one I use in VIM. Get it here: https://github.com/christianbradley/rubymine-stellar-theme

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

Speedy Test Iterations for Rails 3 with Spork and Guard

Overview TDD is fun, right? Rails enthusiasts and agile evangelists alike agree. Waiting for your tests to run, however, makes for a frustrating experience. When the time between test iterations is magnified by bloated tests it can be hard to maintain a purist’s test-driven approach. After looking into autotest, parallel testing, and in-memory databases, I