A sprint is the basic unit of development in Agile. Sprints tend to last between one week and one month and are a “timeboxed” development effort of a constant length.

Our sprint planning session is broken down as follows:

• Product owner – prioritise and explain highest priority items in the product backlog (we use Pivotal Tracker). The team can ask questions at this point.
• Product owner – set a sprint goal (what are we achieving this sprint).
• Team – select Pivotal Tracker stories you can commit to, to attain that goal.
• Team – demonstrate a solution to each story in the sprint and ensure no outstanding questions.

Our Friday afternoon review session:

• Product Owner and Team  - demo all completed stories.
• Team – Review estimates from the sprint and note down how you went and how you can improve (if target not met).
• Team – Review points missed from the sprint and why, and how you can improve on that for next sprint.

If you’re running sprints in your organisation do you do things a little differently? Drop us a line in the comments.

You can see them by clicking the links below:

Australian Mines
Ramelius Resources
BatteryLimits

The Koans walk you along the path to enlightenment in order to learn Ruby. The goal is to learn the Ruby language, syntax, structure, and some common functions and libraries.

By manipulating and building upon Ruby’s TestUnit framework, the EdgeCase developers have created a step-by-step process for teaching Ruby through the practice of “Red, Green, Refactor.” They’ve added some simple game mechanics too, by showing your systematic progression through the 270+ challenges (puzzles). Reaching enlightenment results in a pretty ASCII graphic, and a legitimate sense of achievement.

Before you start with the koans though you’ll need a working Ruby installation. I recommend you take a look at the excellent rvm project, which will allow you to install multiple rubies (1.8.7 and 1.9.2 for example, alongside each other) and multiple gemsets in your home directory. Former Frontiersmen and 2011 Ruby Hero Award winner Darcy Laycock was heavily involved in this project as part of the 2010 Ruby Summer of Code, so we really like rvm at TFG.

The GitHub repository even includes a handy Keynote presentation, which I used as the basis for my talk about Ruby Koans at last week’s Ruby on Rails Oceania Perth meetup.

Lastly, if you’d like to have a play with the koans before diving in too deep, they’re available online through your web browser at Ruby Koans Online. This is a no-risk way of trying out Ruby (hint: team them up with why’s Try Ruby project) in your browser.

Is this you?

You understand the difference between websites and web applications, and you want to write apps that matter for people that care about them.

You’ll have a track record of working on completed projects, and if you’re a Development Manager, you’ll have delivered some of these projects personally. You’ll have a few years commercial experience, probably working as part of a team doing solid but under-appreciated work. You will have experience with Mac, Linux or UNIX, but it might not be your daily environment. Similarly you will have an opinion about vi vs. Emacs or Python vs. Ruby, but you’ll understand that they’re just opinions.

You’ll care about your tools and will take real, genuine pride in the quality of the code you create. You won’t consider automated testing and continuous integration as optional components of a project, and will appreciate automated deployment procedures too. Learning new programming languages and getting more out of the languages you already know will excite you. Efficiency will be important too, and you’ll be looking for ways to automate your workflow and push the repetition off to a script.

You’ll be confident in your programming ability, regardless of the language you prefer, yet humble enough to seek guidance when needed. You’ll know how JavaScript can be used to enhance the web, and will have demonstrated experience with a leading JavaScript library. You might even care about SASS and HAML, if you’re really cool.

Using the right tools is important and we realise that. We don’t have a parent company dictating how we do things or what our “standard operating environment” is – you’ll get to make those decisions with us. We all use MacBook Pros for development, but you might want a new iMac, for example. You’ll keep up to date with current trends and care about using modern techniques and practices, as well as tools and technologies.

What we give you

• Variable salary, dependent on position (Starting at $63,000 on probation)
• 9% superannuation (on top of salary)
• A MacBook Pro with SSD (yours to keep, replaced every two years) ~$3,500
• $1,000 travel allowance per year (parking, bike servicing, public transport)
• Internet and mobile allowance ($80 each per month)
• Current and relevant books, training, tools and gear
• Opportunities to work from home/flexi-time
• Pay reviews every 6 months with no ceiling on earning potential
• Freedom to grow your role with our organisation

What you give us

• Agreed units of production (standard working week)
• Your creative genius and passion

How to apply

Send a short email to jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au and reference your Github and Stack Overflow accounts, along with any Open Source projects you’re involved with. Include a resume if it’s three pages or less.

*International applicants are also welcome

Taking into consideration the needs of our customer base, we decided to integrate e-commerce facilities into our existing CMS platform. This has the immediate appeal that our customers do not need to learn yet a second content management platform. For new customers it’s great that they can now build a website with us and immediately sell online using our pre-built systems.

If you’re looking for a way to sell your products online, enquire about Madison Shop with your new website.

Why Choose Madison?

• Take control of your entire website and online store with a simple content, product & sales management system.
• Give your customers the shopping experience they need with a custom template created by our design team.
• With support for most Australian (and international) banks as well as PayPal you can collect payments right away.

You’re using Capybara, right?

It’s an acceptance / integration test framework for Ruby that superseded Webrat and makes it easy to automatically interact with Web applications but at the user level. It’s now the de facto way to do request / integration / acceptance testing (seriously, it gets called any or all of these) in Rails 3.

Capybara supports using different ‘drivers’ to run the scenarios you specify and by default it’ll use Rack::Test or Selenium (which uses Firefox’s Gecko engine). capybara-webkit is a library by the guys at Thoughtbot that gives Capybara a WebKit-powered driver using the WebKit implementation in Qt, a popular cross-platform development toolkit.

Why?

Why get WebKit involved with your integration tests at all? Perhaps your userbase is primarily made up of Safari and Chrome users (both WebKit-powered browsers) and you want to focus on them. Or perhaps you’re thorough and want to ensure the JavaScript on your pages works fine with your tests in a WebKit scenario too.

Installation

Here’s the bad news. You need Qt installed in order to install capybara-webkit. If you’re on OS X, grab it from here (pick the Cocoa: Mac binary package – the 206MB version). You can install via homebrew too (using brew install qt), but Thoughtbot says it takes forever (well, almost).

For other platforms, check out Qt’s Downloads page.
If you’re on CentOS, in particular, check this article.

Once you’ve installed the Qt toolkit, add this to your app’s Gemfile:

gem 'capybara-webkit'

Then run bundle and you’re off to the races.

Usage

Once everything’s installed, you can set Capybara’s JavaScript driver to use Webkit by default, by adding this to your normal Capybara config options (or if you have none, in spec/spec_helper.rb in most Rails 3 cases):

Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit

Then, if you’re using Cucumber you can add the following tag to the header of your scenario to trigger JavaScript usage specifically (it’s not done by default):

@javascript

In regular RSpec code, you can do something like this:

feature "The signup page" do
scenario "should load", :js => true do
visit new_user_registration_path
page.should have_selector("form.user_new")
end
end

You could also use the :driver option to specify :webkit if you want to choose the driver on a per scenario / describe basis. The same applies to @webkit in Cucumber.

If you’re on OS X, when you first run tests using capybara-webkit the OS X firewall might go a little crazy since it works by connecting over a socket. Just approve it and you’re on your way.

You may also have issues if you’re using transaction fixtures. If so, read the “Transactional Fixtures” section of the Capybara README.

If you’re thinking of visiting either the Mt Lawley or Joondalup campuses on the day, check it out!

Has Face is a neat little gem that uses the face.com API to ensure that an image contains a persons face. It’s very simple to use and can be easily integrated into an existing rails application.

To get started add the has_face gem to your Gemfile and run a bundle install

Can’t see this Gist? View it on Github!

Run the generator to copy over an initializer:

Can’t see this Gist? View it on Github!

The initializer should look something like this:

Can’t see this Gist? View it on Github!

Now we’ll need to make a face.com developer account. You can signup for a free account over at face.com. Once you have signed up, place your API key and API secret in the initializer config.

The last option in the initializer (skip_validation_on_error) will change the behavior of has_face when an error occurs. If set to true, when an error occurs a warning will be logged to the logfile with detailed information about the failure and face validation will be skipped. This can be useful if you want your application to function if the API service is not reachable. If the value is false then an exception will be raised when an API call fails, this will allow you to manually handle the exception yourself, please check the documentation for details on the errors raised.

Once the initializer settings are setup then we can add face validation to a model. In the example below I’m using carrierwave to attach the image to the model but other image attachment gems should also work fine (anything that correctly responds to `path` should be OK).

Can’t see this Gist? View it on Github!

That’s it, that’s all we need to have a functioning face validator. There are a few other options that I haven’t covered here in this short guide, please consult the readme for more detailed information.

“Whilst prototyping the early stages of a new app with Filter Squad, we found ourselves prototyping a lot of API clients for new versions of APIs that were lacking up to date clients or in the case of other APIs, were missing functionality we required.”

Read the full post over at Engine Yard: Building Structured API Clients with API Smith

Firstly, a congratulations to our very own Darcy Laycock for winning a Ruby Hero award. The Ruby Hero awards are put in place to recognise people that have gone above and beyond in the Ruby community.

We’ve rolled out our new Frontier Group blog design, and would love to hear what you think of it in the comments below. We’ve also added a Featured Posts section in the sidebar, so you can see what other visitors (and hopefully you) are interested in too.

We’ve been heavily featured in a range of Podcasts recently, such as Ruby5 and The Ruby Show. Also we’ve been featured in prominent Ruby and Rails websites such as Ruby Weekly and Ruby Rogues.

We’d love you to keep visiting. Sign up to receive our newsletter using the form to the right, or stop back here from time to time. Don’t forget to check out the rest of our site and see what we’ve been working on.