Appalling Farrago

This final month is an interesting one as Joël is working with the same client as Blake but on a different project. The project I worked on with Blake is true Legacy code, a Rails 2 application with plenty of plenty of time invested, while this project is 6 months old and developing fast. It’s almost a green fields application but there are still some bad practises sneaking in that we’re trying to nip in the bud.

The first thing I tackled was the test suit. It fails randomly I believe due to data leaking between tests but it’s tough to tell as the suit is full of mystery guests. As the project is still young, it only took me 3 days to rewrite all the specs to use factory girl in the specs themselves (not hidden away in another file) and setup database cleaner. This brought the test suit from around 1 minute 35 seconds down to 1 minute 15 seconds, which is a nice bonus to the refactor.

I also had a brief encounter with adobe illustrator. I built up a svg of the board for the diplomacy application. It should be fairly straight forward to have ember create the svg nodes as components giving us an interactive board. I had initially thought we’d use the javascript library ammaps but I found myself basically disabling all the features. It’ll be interesting to see how easy it is interacting with the svg directly as this is something I have no experience with.

I have a meeting scheduled next week with Chad and Josh concerning the apprenticeship. This is also when they would put forward an offer of employment if they feel I’m a good fit for the company. I’m nervous yet confident so hopefully I’ll have good news in next weeks post.