For some reason, people seem to have an issue with migrations … they get them confused with schemas. Allow me to explain.

A lot of people seem to sit on changes they want to make models, collecting changes for “one big migration.” As if it were of utmost important that the migration be complete.

This is nothing new, but, having seen enough Rails developers using custom helpers to do the same thing, I thought it might warrant a quick tip.

If you’re entering dates/times in your fixtures, you’re probably familiar with this trick:

  ---
  item1:
    id: 1
    name: foo
    created_at: <%= 3.days.ago.to_s(:db) %>

One thing about Rails that’s a bit annoying to those of us who have been using Ruby for a long time is the lack of support for RubyGem-based plugins.

You have to take into account the kind of torture conversations like this were, for years upon years, and the kind of psychological damage it did to all of us:

What’s Ruby’s CPAN?

Anything like CPAN for Ruby?

What’s the package/library manager for Ruby?

Ruby sucks! Where’s CPAN?

There was an issue with test_helper variables set on Test::Unit::TestCase not being set properly. Values would always be the default because of the way class inherited attributes are passed down the hierarchy. You now need to require the active_test framework and any other plugins you have installed at the end of RAILS_ROOT/test/test_helper.rb.