At the start of the fall semester I began a continuing education class at the New York School of Visual Arts Advanced Metalworking. The goal for taking this class is to construct a 11-12th century Norman helmet for use in full contact western martial arts in the SCA. I am beginning this post over a month into the class as much of the initial class time was spent honing skills and techniques needed for smithing.

Last week a ran into a bit of an issue trying to write Rspec Stories for the app I am working on. The app in question depends on a remote service based authentication system. Creating “test” users on a remote user authentication service already running as production for other apps was not really an option. Getting around this proved to be problematic as Rspec Stories entire point is to test the “full stack”.

By now most Rails developers have come to know and love (or not?) RESTful resources and the controller code that implements them. For the most part Merb’s implementation of resources will be familiar and adheres to the same convention - GET safe creates, updates, destroys, a single base URI for a single resource, etc.

So its finally official… I am headed out to RailsConf in Portland, OR next week!

Update 06/2019: 11 years ago I may have really disliked Visual Studio, but ironically I now consider it one of the best IDEs on the market. Having since done significant amounts of C# development (with the VIM plugin of course) I now really appreciate how well made it is.