Now that Jake , Mad Robby, and Atmos have talked about it, I suppose I can mention part of what I’ve been working on for the last few days.
I’ve learned a lot. Specifically:
- Mac users can do pair programming remotely with SubEthaEdit. Very, very cool, even if another developer did ask me to unhighlight some text because I’d turned his entire window “Hello Kitty pink.” Each coder, and there can be more than two, has their own color. I just went with the default, which happened to be pink. So, selecting all the text shows up to all other users, and brighter than any changes you’ve made.
- Subversion is even cooler than I thought.
- ‘rake migrate’ is your friend, even during development. Later, you can get the stable version of the db, remove the migrations-specific table, and remove all the migrations. Until then, it’s really spiff to be able to have an entire team add and drop columns and tables in the comfort of their development environment.
- Test-Driven development is great stuff, but one should ensure that tests run before typing ‘svn commit.’ Really. Rails has a fine framework for unit and functional testing. While I’d understood the unit testing, this project gave me some better insight into writing functional tests.
- BaseCamp (initially, we used Backpack) is great for managing what still needs to be done on a project.