Highgroove Face-off: Acceptance testing with RSpec versus Cucumber

Highgroovers take test-driven design (TDD) seriously, but it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the number of tools available for testing applications. However, if you know us even a little, you know that we have a lot of experience using different tools—and that we’ve developed some opinions about them.…

It’s the endian of the world as we know it

Author:
Mark Dalrymple

CocoaHeads Boise on twitter asked for an elaboration on big vs little endian. In the query was a very interesting statement: “surprised not mentioned in my C books.” I had never thought about endianness issues being covered in introductory materials .…

Redirect www Subdomain to Your Apex Domain Using the Rails Router

Author:
Steven Harman

It’s 2012. We know it’s the World Wide Web. We don’t need to be reminded of that by prepending www. to the URL of every site we visit. In fact, the use of www. as the de facto subdomain of The Web was an accident.…

Interns can’t make coffee

Author:
Kurt Nelson

If I were the new intern at any other company, I would most likely be fetching coffee, keeping the kitchen clean and working on the projects that nobody else wants. But here at Highgroove, things are entirely different.

First of all, I can’t even make coffee at Highgroove.…

Hack Night got hacked

Author:
Tasha Schroeder

Each month, we open our doors for a Hack Night, inviting others to join us as we experiment with and work on various technologies.

For the August Hack Night, we sharpened our focus and added a little more structure. For the first time, we posed a challenge to those attending: Could they hack our RFID door reader to allow our chat robot to open the front door of our office?…

enum-num-num

Author:
Mark Dalrymple

As happens occasionally, an interesting technical discussion ensues in an IRC channel. Earlier this week, this question came up why does Apple do this to most of their enums in the Cocoa headers:

enum {
    NSRoundPlain,
    NSRoundDown,
    NSRoundUp,
    NSRoundBankers
};
typedef NSUInteger NSRoundingMode;

Instead of the more straightforward:

typedef enum {
    NSRoundPlain,
    NSRoundDown,
    NSRoundUp,
    NSRoundBankers
} NSRoundingMode;

I can’t speak for Apple’s motivation, but the first thing that jumps to mind is to have variables and struct/object members of this enum type be of a predictable size.…

Perk Up! Why Highgroove offers such great benefits

Author:
Jim Hodgson

A great benefits package can help attract new recruits and reward employees who stay with you long term, but there’s no reason to go overboard with it, is there?

Well, we think so!

There is a “benefits arms race” being waged by top technology companies.…

Learning to say no to scope creep

Author:
Don Pottinger

Building products as a Highgroover and a co-founder of Body Boss has taught me that saying “No” to scope creep can mean the difference between a bloated, unfinished project and the successful release of an MVP.

As a former Big 4 consultant, I was taught that scope creep is ugly, and a supervisor once told me that it in an ideal world, it should never happen.…

Before the Presentation

Author:
Mark Dalrymple

Ever have one of those moments, after a flurry of activity, and realized what you’ve accomplished? Now that this summer is over, I realized that I’ve talked a lot. Three CocoaHeads presentations. Back-to-back 90 minute sessions at two CocoaConfs. Taught a week-long class with some extra evening sessions.…