Chris Sass's Blog Posts Tagged 'ruby' (2)

I know "Microsoft" is not the first word that comes mind when you're writing a ruby application but since Google dropped the free tier for their translation service the Microsoft Translator API is a good alternative for a small/personal project that you don't want to have to bother with the monthly bill.  

Recently I've had to use this API in a project and this weekend I extracted the functionality out into a simple gem.  I present to you 'microsoft_translator'  (queue…

This post is just a friendly reminder for those that practice TDD/BDD to make sure they are not putting more ceremony into their tests than is necessary.  Use mocks and stubs instead!

Mocks are just stand-ins that behave like the thing we want it to represent.  Stubs will fake a method call and return a canned response.  These save time both in setting up the test and in running it (depending on if your real objects are persisted in a test database).  When you test a method…