Hugo Corbucci's Blog

Martians, go home - by Frederick Brown

Posted on January 23rd, 2015

Short science fiction story that touches on interesting matters, one of which fairly modern: the loss of privacy.

Frederick brown presents this novel in 3 parts: the arrival of martians on earth, their stay, their departure. The core is obviously around their stay although both opening and closing present interesting description of human reactions and...

Notes on upgrading from Rails 4.1 to 4.2

Posted on January 21st, 2015

This one is a fairly easy upgrade although it was a little hard to discover all the issues. The main work was around removing Inherited Resources.

Here are more detailed notes:

  • All calls to .deliver become .deliver_now. Including in your tests and stubs. If you had any tests that depended on the code block to be executed, you have to call .deliver_now as method...

Implementation Patterns - by Kent Beck

Posted on January 17th, 2015

Kent Beck provides on this book much lower level details into his programming preferences. He presents and discusses a lot of very common programming options and decisions.
Starting the book with some explanation into why those small decisions are...

Notes on upgrading from Rails 4.0 to 4.1

Posted on January 14th, 2015

This upgrade was fairly easy. The thing that will potentially give you more work are tests around ajax requests.

Here are the few detailed notes:

  • ActiveModels now includes a none scope by default. So if you have some none scope defined, just remove their definitions.
  • The state machine gem has not been updated for Rails 4.1 yet. Rails 4.1 made private the around_validation method in ActiveModels. Since state machine uses this method to inject its own validations, you need an extension for it. I’ve created a file named config/initializers/state_machine.rb and added the following code:
    module StateMachine::Integrations::ActiveModel; public :around_validation; end
  • CFRS is also possible in AJAX request. Because of this AJAX requests are checked against it as well as of Rails 4.1. Therefore, in your tests, get :whatever, :format => ‘js’ has to become xhr :get, :whatever, :format => :js

Brazil's dance with the devil - by Dave Zirin

Posted on January 10th, 2015

Dave Zirin’s book brings his journalistic view around the impacts of hosting the World Cup and the Olympics in Brazil. Dave starts by describing a bit of the reality he found in Brazil during his investigative trip. He moves on to describe some of Brazil's history from the Portuguese colonization to the US imposed dictatorship. With this basis, he goes on to explain Lula’s administration and...

Notes on upgrading Rails from 3.2 to 4.0

Posted on January 7th, 2015

The upgrade itself is not that hard. The main thing is the change from models protected from mass-assignment to strong parameters in the controllers. The rest is fairly quick and simple.

Here are more detailed notes:

  • Strong parameters: Use the gem in 3.2 and move any attr_accessible out of your models. Ensure you added the config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = false to your...

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time - by Mark Haddon

Posted on January 2nd, 2015

Beautiful book. The story of a piece of the narrator, Christopher, life starting the day he his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, is killed. Christopher is a 15 year old autistic boy living in Swindon, UK. He loves puzzles and decides to investigate the murder of Wellington and writes the book to tell the story of the investigation upon suggestion by one of his teachers, Siobhan, which seems to...

ThoughtWorks Antology 2 - by various authors

Posted on December 26th, 2014

The [second of the ThoughtWorks anthology]:(http://www.amazon.com/ThoughtWorks-Anthology-Software-Technology-Innovation/dp/1937785009) about 4 years after the [first one]:(http://blog.hugocorbucci.com/thoughtworks-antology-various-authors). Like the previous one, this one balances between very narrow concrete subjects and more abstract ones which makes the book age very differently depending on the chapter.

The following notes detail each chapter:

Chapter 1: Introduction -...

In the valley of the kings - by Terrence Holt

Posted on December 20th, 2014

In this book composed of multiple short stories, Terrence Holt brings us to both the past and the future around self-discovery and death. Each story is independent and can be read in any order although it gets a little repetitive if reading from start to end in a day.

Here are notes on each story:

'O Aoyos:

Description of an epidemic disease related to seeing a word. This word...

Thoughtworks antology - by various authors

Posted on December 17th, 2014

This anthology marks the first of multiple anthologies that ThoughtWorks published.

Chapter 2: Last Mile - Roy Singham & Michael Robinson

Precursor for Continuous Delivery. Including non functional requirements at start of development cycle.
Doesn’t really provides ideas into how to avoid getting slow to release after growth. More into saying that just not...