RubyC-2014. Interview with Ben Lovell
Kiev Ruby, Ruby on Rails conference – RubyC – continues shaping up! First of all organizers – Svitla Systems company – gladly presents our General Sponsor – SoftServe – the biggest Ukrainian IT company, which will make RubyC even more exciting and useful to the participants.
Also we present an interview with yet another speaker – Ben Lovell – a brilliant rubyist who comes from sunny England ©. Being such a prominent contributor Ben has delivered lectures at many conferences worldwide JRubyConf EU, Ruby Manor 4 and EuRuKo. On RubyC Ben presents topic named “Building fast, testable and sane APIs with rails”, detailed information on http://rubyc.eu/#speakers, and read on about Ben below!
1. What tools do you usually use in your practice? OS, text editor, etc.
Where do I start!? I use and love Apple hardware. I spend most of my life in zsh, with tmux and vim. I'm a huge vim fanatic and love the idea that despite spending many years using it, I have barely scratched the surface in my knowledge of its many intricacies. We use Rails and sinatra for our web stuff and APIs, RubyMotion and Android for mobile stuff.
We push to github, build with travis, provision with puppet and deploy with capistrano. We host most of our stuff on either digital ocean or linode VMs and we currently deploy mostly to MRI 2.X. We do have plans to move some of our client projects and products over to JRuby - so watch this space!
We're huge TDD proponents here at 1minus1 (boo, DHH!) and use a mixture of tools and frameworks including RSpec, capybara, Frank, cucumber, factory girl and others.
2. Can you name the project that you are proud of?
I'm a huge fan of the microframeworks such as Sinatra. I'm also a big fan of the Rails-API project, ActiveModel::Serializers and all the great thinking behind these tools and frameworks. I've been using RSpec and capybara for some time now and have contributed to both over the years. Sidekiq is awesome, and built on one of my favourite open source projects: Celluloid.
3. How often do you test code in your projects. What technologies of testing do you use?
We TATFT! But seriously - we won't accept PRs on our internal projects without good coverage from tests. Although we do understand our clients don't pay us to write tests - they pay us to ship products so we're most certainly not dogmatic in our approach to testing.
We use a mix of tools and frameworks but mostly centered around RSpec and Capybara (for front-end and integration style testing) or RSpec and rack-test when testing our API projects.
4. What professional advice can you propose?
Be a nice human being. Respect other people and always remember no matter how smart you think you are - you can learn new ideas and techniques from anybody. Take a look outside of the ruby community and see how other people are solving problems. Broaden your horizons! Oh, and watch out for sharks.
5. What are your next steps after RubyC?
I'm speaking at a bunch of different conferences this year, and as always I am delivering client projects and products which keeps me very busy and is lots of fun! I'm trying to find more time to devote to open source and amongst this all still find time for my two young children! I'm a busy guy :)
I'm really excited to attend RubyC and share what I've learned about building great JSON APIs. Hopefully I'll see you all real soon! Stay safe.
Organizers remind that there are only two weeks left before the RubyC conference! Do not miss the chance to buy Late Birds tickets on http://rubyc.eu/#tickets !
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SoftServe — is Ukraine’s largest IT company that provides services in the development, testing and maintenance of information systems and business solutions. http://softserve.ua