Writing Readable Ruby

Ruby inherits the philosophy of “there’s more than one way to do it,” or TMTOWTDI, from Perl. Of course, TMTOWTDI is worthless unless at least a handful of those ways can be written clearly not just for the author, but (perhaps more importantly) for future readers and editors.…

Salesforce on Rails with the Databasedotcom Gem

Author:
Dan Rice

At Highgroove, we’re always looking for new ruby gems to help speed up development and keep the code DRY. The gem I found this time was Heroku’s very own Databasedotcom gem, a fantastic Salesforce.com API wrapper for Ruby! I must admit, I wasn’t very surprised to find a gem since Salesforce owns Heroku, but I did not expect it to be so fantastic and easy to use.…

Category Pros and Cons

Author:
Mark Dalrymple

Objective-C categories are cool. They allow you do something that you can’t do in most compiled languages: add new methods to existing classes. You can even add methods to classes that you didn’t write.

Suppose you wrote some code to translate an ordinary string, like “Hello, perhaps I could enjoy a bit of your delicious sandwich over there?” to LOLcat speak, like “I can has cheezburger?”

In other languages you would probably subclass the String object and add a member function called -lolspeek which does the translation.…

ARC Gotcha – Unexpectedly Short Lifetimes

Author:
Mark Dalrymple

One of our engineers was working on a project and wrote some code that crashed when running on a device:

    CGColorRef color = 
        [UIColor colorWithRed: 0.2  
                        green: 0.3  
                         blue: 0.4  
                        alpha: 1.0].CGColor;
    [[self.view layer]
        setBackgroundColor: color];

It looks reasonable. Could it be a toolkit bug?…

Rails and CanCan: Authorization for Specific Fields

Author:
Andy Lindeman

A recent project we worked on at Highgroove involved scheduling events on a calendar. These events had a lifecycle of “statuses,” such as “pending approval” and “approved.”

All users were able to set the “status” to values such as “pending approval,” but only certain privileged users could move them to states such as “approved.”

We were already using CanCan for authorization, but there was no built-in facility for authorizing field-level changes.…

Our Open-Source Methodology at Highgroove

Author:
David Worth

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Open-Source software makes all of our lives better. It allows us to do our jobs without reimplementing the wheel each time. It allows us to understand the nuts and bolts of how the software we use operates … and even change those internals if we need to!…

Why Highgroove has a Personal Trainer

Author:
Brian Hardy

At Highgroove, we have a personal trainer, Cherri, on-staff and on-site, available twice a week to us, scheduled via appointment slots using Google Calendar. Our personal trainer has been with us since December of last year, and we just added more sessions.…

Working Hard or Working Efficiently?

Author:
jason

Companies often feel that they are getting the most out of their employees if everyone is working as hard as possible for as long as possible. However, this can be exhausting on the employees and can lead to diminishing returns. We feel that the better approach is to emphasize efficiency over effort, and our level of productivity speaks for itself.…

Another Reason To Use Github

Author:
Aubrey Rhodes

While getting to know the very sweet Github Api v3, I ran into a little bug when trying to page though results coming back from the service. While it was frustrating at the time, Github’s support and resolution blew me out of the water.…