Bendyworks

What's happening in
Geekville

Never trust software developers who don't embrace their inner geek. We're actively engaged in the pro­gram­ming world, and have plenty to say and share on the subjects that excite us. Consider this our simul­taneous soapbox, corkboard, and scrap­book for all things geeky.

Article

Posted on 02.09.13 by Joe |

You Don't Know Your Visitors, So Stop Pretending

Part 1: What is analytics really?

Web analytics should hurt a little. Not just the pain of seeing your low traffic revealed in hard numbers, but the realization that you don't really know your visitors.

We programmers tend to be preoccupied by our creations. We repetitively visit our sites, refining and building. Reading our own copy again and again becomes almost hypnotic. The sentences start to seem so right, so laden with all the meanings of our intentions and our history with the project.

Then we unveil our website to the public and shit gets real.

High bounce rates abound. Visitors mysteriously fail to get very far into the site. Visitors talk trash about the experience (if they talk about it at all). What can you do? Your secret weapon is properly designed analytics. ...continue reading

Article

Posted on 12.06.12 by Chris |

From Ruby to Haskell, Part 1: Testing

You read that right. Or maybe, if you read it as "stop using Ruby and start using Haskell", you read it wrong. I'm going to show you why I find Haskell to be utterly fascinating and eminently practical.

Foremost, I want to collect some bits and pieces from articles that I have read and talks that I have seen. I feel like there are troves of information out there but that it may perhaps be in need of some synthesis. There are lot of meaty topics here, but I haven't seen them collected and prepared quite to my taste yet. If my collecting will help someone else to "think different" then that's exactly what I had hoped for.

A secondary aim is to make clear some things for myself, and again, I'm happy to take anyone else along for the ride. ...continue reading

Tutorial

Posted on 11.08.12 by Jaymes |

Testing Security with Brakeman

Security in web applications is not something developers discuss often enough - some think of it as a taboo subject, or something the NOC guys have to deal with. Some treat security as a post deployment afterthought. Sometimes little thought is given after an attack has already occurred. Some web developers ignore security all together.

This attitude is unfortunate and unprofessional, because many of the common attack points are within control of the developer. Developers usually don’t know about them, but ignorance won't help recreate that maliciously dropped database table.

As developers we need to be conscious of security at every point in development.

Ruby on Rails has security built in, as documented ...continue reading

Lab project

Posted on 04.26.12 by Brad |

Introducing Bwoken

Bwoken is a UIAutomation test runner for both iPhone and iPad, which lets you write your tests in CoffeeScript, then run them in bulk from the command line. Watch the video, then head on over to its homepage!

Tutorial

Posted on 02.02.12 by Jaymes |

UIAutomation and Pusher

UIAutomation is Apple’s answer to integration tests. It allows you to drive and run assertions against your application using a javascript library that interacts with user interface elements. It’s great to have such a powerful tool, but what if you have an application that depends on external triggers, such as Pusher events?

Let me introduce you to UIAHost. More specifically, it’s method performTaskWithPathArgumentsTimeout. What this allows you to do is execute a script in the flow of your tests.

Say we want to execute the ruby script:

All we have to do in our UIAutomation script is this:

That’s a pretty simple ruby script, and will fail to find the pusher gem on any of our machines at Bendyworks because we use ...continue reading