Jake Howerton

Safariwatir is an (incomplete) implementation of Watir except that, you guessed it: it drives Apple’s Safari browser rather than IE. It is missing a decent chunk of functionality from its IE counterpart, but one thing that was particularly irking me in some integration tests was the inability to get the current URL back.

Throw this in your test_helper or spec_helper

Not bad at all…

Everyone knows that the market for Rails developers is pretty tight, for a host of reasons. The technology is new, so only the real movers got on board with enought time to have very sharp skills at this point. As the market fills out, this discrepancy between demand for Rails developers and the actual supply is going to be a breeding ground for recruiters trying to pair people with talent to interesting opportunities. This my friend is a good thing for those of us on the supply side(for now).

Anywhere there is this kind of reward there are probably going to be people operating in shady ways. Over at the workingwithrails website, (which had a shaky shady start of its own; see fun from zedas), there is a list of tons of Rails developers, including me, and recruiters seem to be trolling this resource to find leads on talent. This morning I got this email.

Hello,

While checking out the Working With Rails website, you listed 
yourself as available for hire. We are looking for a programmer 
who can create support and administrative systems in Ruby 
on Rails for a game related project.

The job requires a minimum commitment of 25 hours per week 
and is an offsite position. If this is something you would be 
interested in, please email me back with a phone number or 
aim/skype contact so we can talk in more detail.

Thank You

Here are some hints for potential recruiters:

• Include your freakin’ name in your email
• Dont use a generic scamish sounding email address rubyhires-at-gmail-dot-com
• If you are a small one person shop, embrace it, instead of hiding behind smoke and mirrors, because then we are just going to assume the worst

By following these concepts you will be able to avoid embarassment for both yourself and your clients, as well as the ire of people in the ruby community with the talent that you need to tap.

There are a couple of reasons why I think this is a good idea.

1. After I normally deploy I usually have to go through my todo list and look over what I have accomplished, before sending an email manually to my team ( I am the only developer). This eliminates any errors and ommissions associated with this process.
2. Forcing myself to do more atomic commits and writing more coherent commit messages. I often catch myself committing from the base directory of my app when I have made changes in more than one part of my application. In that case I either have to write a complex commit message, or (usually) write a crappy one. Now that I know this is going to get emailed to non-technical people and/or clients, it forces me to do better

There are a few other ideas floating around that are similar to this which I used as my inspiration:

• very similar method at TeamAskins
• the post-commit hook way
• if youd rather have it in Campfire from Chris Wanstrath