At Made we create web software that is built to last, so every aspect of the codebase has to be easy to understand and maintainable by any member of the team. Because of this we run our server side code through tools like Tailor and Cane to keep complexity low and consistency high.
Cloud and engineering
The Made Code Dojo
Following on from our adoption of the mob programming technique, we’ve been keeping our skills sharp by gathering the entire team in the Made Code Dojo (aka the meeting room) every fortnight and doing some kung fu.
ActiveRecord Refactoring: Concerns
ActiveRecord provides a lot of power – if not too much. To that power we add our own business logic to create rather large domain models. Here at Made I’ve started looking at various ways to tone down the responsibilities of my ActiveRecord models using various programming patterns.
Metaprogramming in Ruby
When you find yourself duplicating functionality that is similar to existing functionality in your system, it may be an indication that the process could be generalised to accommodate more scenarios. This has the benefit that this ‘role’ would be encapsulated and the source code would exist in only one place, becoming less of a maintenance burden.
SEO and design updates launched for VGL
As part of our ongoing relationship with VGL, the team behind Surface View, we recently rolled out an update that features refreshed designs for key areas of their site, responsive email templates, and a host of SEO-friendly enhancements.
Spree meets Travis CI
At Made we love using Spree, it is the platform that powers all our recent eCommerce builds. Spree has a great community behind it who churn out some fantastic extensions that, when combined, can pull together a platform to fulfil almost any client requirement.
ActiveRecord associations and the valid? flag when building
I was debugging a mysterious bug using RSpec and it took a while to figure out what exactly was going on. I thought that I would document my findings here, as I could not find much information on the subject and ended up digging into the ActiveRecord source code.
Mobile enable your email newsletters
It’s no secret that over the past couple of years there’s been a very obvious upward trend in the use of mobile devices to visit websites. Only this week Google suggested that by December 2014, 50% of web searches will be conducted on mobile.
UNIX at Made
Everyone in the Made office seems to prefer Unix based systems. Why is that? Sure everyone likes Apple products, they are considered stable, relatively speaking, but I don’t think that everybody appreciates where most of that stability comes from.
Time to Schema up
At Made we are always on the lookout for technologies and practices that enable us to deliver better code. Practices that can speed up page loads, help us write better tests, or in this case, offer up SEO improvements.
