I’m glad to announce that I’ll be conducting the morning tutorial session at the upcoming Windy City Rails Conference.

It’s a 3-hour tutorial called REST 101: Best Practices for Rails Developers.

If you’re relatively new to Rails, especially if you’re currently a .NET or Java developer who’s trying to figure out how to really get started with Rails, this tutorial is for you. If you’re a more seasoned developer, then you should still attend the conference. There’s a great lineup of speakers, all-day coding sessions, and more.

The conference will be held on September 12, 2009 in downtown Chicago. If you register now, you can get the early bird rate of $99 for conference admission or just $199 for the conference with one tutorial session. For those who might not have heard of the annual Windy City Rails conference before, the conference donates all profits to local charities, like the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

So register now for the conference and/or tutorial. We’ll learn a lot, have fun, and support a good cause all in one day.

Questions? Leave a comment below and I’ll try to respond quickly.

Thanks! See you there!

Most of you git geeks probably already knew this, but recently I learned how to make git a little more usable for me.

One of the things I appreciate about Subversion’s command line interface is that, usually, you don’t have to type the entire command name. As long as you enter enough of the command so it can’t be confused with another subversion command, it will work.

For example, instead of doing:

svn status

I always do

svn st

(i know, I know, you can go even further and create shell aliases that are even further, or shell scripts, or whatever…)

Anyway, now that I’m using git for my personal projects, I end up doing this a lot:

git status

But recently I learned that I can make this shorter by creating a git alias for the status command (or any other command I want).

So I did this:

git config alias.st status

Now I can do this instead:

git st

You can do the same for git commit:

git config alias.ci commit

For more information about how to create aliases in git, well… just Google for it. You’ll be glad you did.

It seems I’m in a super-minority among Rails developers.

First of all, I write tests. My unscientific guess is that less than half of people who call themselves Rails developers actually write tests.

Second, I write tests first. Of those that write tests, I would guess that less than half write them before writing the implementation code.

So already I’m in the group of “those crazy TDD developers”. But you know what’s even worse?

In that very group of “crazy TDD developers”, I bet more than half use RSpec.

But I don’t. Instead, I use a combination of shoulda, webrat, and mocha.

Honestly I don’t know why I’ve never liked RSpec. Lots of smart people use it, and maybe I just don’t understand it. But I don’t think business users will write tests with the story runner. The most they’ll ever do is read them, which is still valuable. But they can read my webrat tests well enough.

Also, RSpec just feels… heavy. There are spaces between words when I expect ruby-like underscores instead:

Model.should have(1).record

This just looks weird to me.

Unfortunately learning Mocha hasn’t been like falling off a log, either. There’s an excellent Google Group, but I don’t really know of a simple “Getting Started with Mocha” guide anywhere, so it’s taken me a while to get up to speed. Maybe I should take the time to write one? If enough people are interested I’d be willing to give it a shot.

So, there it is. I don’t use RSpec. So flame away and tell me know if I’m a genius or a moron.

I’m glad to help announce RailsBridge, a great idea put forth by Mike Gunderloy. Mike invited me (and many others) last week to join his concept for a positive approach inside the Rails community, and so far things look promising.

I hope to help out by donating time and energy toward any public workshops the group may choose to host, as well do any writing and mentoring that may be needed. The group will do many other things, but for now those are the two that I feel most qualified to do (see here and here if you’re a new reader and don’t know what I’m talking about).

I wasn’t able to make it to RailsConf, but some other RailsBridge members are there, so find them, learn more about it, and join us if you’re so inclined.

A couple weeks ago I was pretty depressed about the state of the Rails community. But now, I’m more optimistic that ever.

Thanks, Mike.

Dan Woolley writes:

I took your course in Chicago a couple of years ago – I think it was your first one. I finally left my comfy corporate job and went full time on Rails in July 2008. I recently released my first Rails app – Dwellicious (http://dwellicious.com). That is our free site for consumers that helps you organize, share, and discuss the search for homes for sale on the internet.

Congrats, Dan. Dwellicious is beautifully designed, well executed, and yes, has a real business model.

Are you a .NET developer who's turned to Rails? What's your success story? Link it up in the comments or e-mail us. We'll take the best ones, post them here, and send you a free copy of Rails for .NET Developers.