Working With Rails

In this, the final installment of the Hackfest winner interviews, we talk to Rails core contributor Kevin Clark.

Kevin is well known in the Rails community for the Heckle test tool - many of the other Hackfest contestants used this to help them uncover weak spots in the Rails source and gain valuable points in the contest.

Web Exclusive: Kevin also shares with us some exciting news in this interview. He has been working on a new publication that will be of interest to the Rails community. I won't spoil the announcement here so read on to find out more.

Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?

I was working on a research project a couple years ago where we were trying to track meme propagation through the live journal image stream. I started to write a proof of concept in PHP (there was freely available source to one of the many LJ image aggregators), but wasn't enjoying myself. About that time a friend read about Ruby and Rails somewhere and pointed me towards it. I got excited, and wrote the app in a couple of weeks while learning the language and framework.

Now I'm a developer at Powerset where I build tools. The far majority of my work is in Ruby, and I use Rails off and on.

Q: What Rails projects are you working on right now?

My most recent Rails apps have been building up infrastructure within the company. One project, Tak, is a web frontend for viewing package information in our repositories. It's able to track new versions, dependencies and dependent packages, and handles other goodies I can't talk about right now.

I've also done a good bit of work on Ruby libraries and a Rails based front end to build clusters of nodes on Amazon's EC2.

Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?

A friend in #caboose complained that it was annoying to 'svn add' files created from script/generator whenever it was used. I agreed, and decided it would be a good way to introduce myself to the codebase.

That because my first patch.

Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.

Most of my patches for the rails hackfest were test coverage patches. Actually, in the end I used the hackfest largely to stress test heckle against the Rails source. I wanted it to be stable enough that it could stand even stand up to something as large, complex, dynamic, and (at times) hairy as the Rails source. I took my shiny new heckle output and helped fill in gaps in test coverage where I could.

One of the reasons I was interested in heckle, and particularly in heckling the Rails source is that I'd really like to help push refactoring and cleanup in various areas in the codebase. It's hard to do that with confidence with large gaps in test coverage. Unfortunately, there are sections that just aren't tested, and more that aren't tested enough for large reorganization. My patches worked to make that more possible.

Q: If you worked on the Rails source before the contest what kind of contributions have you made?

As I mentioned, -c with generators is mine. I've also submitted various bugfixes, wrote the first test code (and ActiveRecord test harness) for pagination in ActionPack, have written or edited a good amount of documentation, and added other minor features here and there. I've got about 25 patches with my name on them in core.

My focus in the recent past has been on test coverage and tools.

Q: Tell us a bit about your development environment

TextMate, Autotest, Mocha on one of my various macs. Heckle when I'm feeling rigorous or encountering someone else's (sometimes untested) code.

For the hackfest I generally found a bit of code I felt could use improvement, and ran heckle against it. Then I worked to add focused test cases to deal with the situations the tests didn't cover.

For new code I'm test-first.

I've been doing some python work lately, and by far the library I miss the most is Mocha. It's head and shoulders above any mocking library I've seen in any language. It makes the occasional departure from Ruby more painful.

Q: What is the best part about contributing to the Rails source?

The girls. It's a well known secret that girls go wild for Rails hackers. Really ;)

For me contributing is about the community. It's about giving back, and being able to become immersed in this wonderful group of people doing really interesting things. It's an honor to be part of that.

Q: With 1.2 released we are now looking forward to 2.0. What kind of

Less. The major accomplishment for 2.0 will be removal of the cruft. I want to see things pluginized, streamlined, and well tested. We went through this huge expansionist phase before the plugin architecture was written, and we need to pull out the things that just don't belong in every Rails app (this describes a lot).

One of my dreams is to get to the point where we can refactor ActiveRecord to make a really fast mock database possible. That would make me happy.

Q: Closing words

I'm going to be speaking (along with a truly amazing collection of speakers, I'm really excited) at SD Forum in San Jose April 22-23.

Also, I believe this is a Working With Rails web exclusive, but Tom Preston-Werner (fellow Powersetter of Gravatar, Chronic, and FixtureScenarios fame) and I are writing a book on Test Driven Development with Rails for the Pragmatic Programmers. We're excited, to say the very least.

Working With Rails Profile

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