Evan Marell Evan-M

Moving to ES6 from CoffeeScript

I fell in love with CoffeeScript a couple of years ago. Javascript has always seemed something of an interesting curiosity to me and I was happy to see the meteoric rise of Node.js, but coming from a background of Python I really preferred a cleaner syntax.

In any fast moving community it is inevitable that things will change, and so today we see a big shift toward ES6, the new version of Javascript. It incorporates a handful of the nicer features from CoffeeScript and is usable today through tools like Babel. Here are some of my thoughts and issues on moving away from CoffeeScript in favor of ES6.

While reading I suggest keeping open a tab to Babel's learning ES6 page. The examples there are great.

Punctuation

Holy punctuation, Batman! Say goodbye to your whitespace and hello to parenthesis, curly braces, and semicolons again. Even with the advanced ES6 syntax you'll find yourself writing a lot more punctuatio

Initialize

gitflow	git
`git flow init`	`git init`
	`git commit --allow-empty -m "Initial commit"`
	`git checkout -b develop master`

Connect to the remote repository

Better Jasmine Tests With `this`

On the Refinery29 Mobile Web Team, codenamed "Bicycle", all of our unit tests are written using Jasmine, an awesome BDD library written by Pivotal Labs. We recently switched how we set up data for tests from declaring and assigning to closures, to assigning properties to each test case's this object, and we've seen some awesome benefits from doing such.

The old way

Up until recently, a typical unit test for us looked something like this:

describe('views.Card', function() {

Originally published in June 2008

When hiring Ruby on Rails programmers, knowing the right questions to ask during an interview was a real challenge for me at first. In 30 minutes or less, it's difficult to get a solid read on a candidate's skill set without looking at code they've previously written. And in the corporate/enterprise world, I often don't have access to their previous work.

To ensure we hired competent ruby developers at my last job, I created a list of 15 ruby questions -- a ruby measuring stick if you will -- to select the cream of the crop that walked through our doors.

What to expect

Candidates will typically give you a range of responses based on their experience and personality. So it's up to you to decide the correctness of their answer.

ruby-1.9.3-p392 cumulative performance patch for rbenv

(I guarantee nothing. No warranty I am not responsible blah blah blah. Seems to work great for me so far. Thanks to Tyler Bird who I forked this from.)

This installs a patched ruby 1.9.3-p392 with the railsexpress patchsets: https://github.com/skaes/rvm-patchsets

	# Install Git needed for Git based gems
	packages:
	yum:
	git: []

	# db/migrate/XXXXXXXXXXXXX_add_authentication_token_to_users.rb

	class AddAuthenticationTokenToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
	def change
	add_column :users, :authentication_token, :string

	add_index :users, :authentication_token, :unique => true
	end
	end

	<!-- For third-generation iPad with high-resolution Retina display: -->
	<!-- Size should be 144 x 144 pixels -->
	<%= favicon_link_tag 'apple-touch-icon-144x144-precomposed.png', :rel => 'apple-touch-icon-precomposed', :type => 'image/png', :sizes => '144x144' %>

	<!-- For iPhone with high-resolution Retina display: -->
	<!-- Size should be 114 x 114 pixels -->
	<%= favicon_link_tag 'apple-touch-icon-114x114-precomposed.png', :rel => 'apple-touch-icon-precomposed', :type => 'image/png', :sizes => '114x114' %>

	<!-- For first- and second-generation iPad: -->
	<!-- Size should be 72 x 72 pixels -->

	source 'https://rubygems.org'
	# Follows the bundler group pattern described here:
	# http://iain.nl/getting-the-most-out-of-bundler-groups

	# Gemfile.mine in root dir allows locally custom gems.
	# NOTE: Doing this will change the Gemfile.lock - commit with care.
	eval File.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'Gemfile.mine')) if File.exists? File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'Gemfile.mine')

	ruby '1.9.3'