I spent years writing tests for my Rails apps, and every single test file began with this one, seemingly innocuous line: require 'spec_helper' When I first started writing tests, I had no idea why I wrote this line – other than that’s what the README said to do. At first glance, what ...
We have been developing gems a lot as part of giving more structure to Rails applications: the idea and some techniques . Doing this often sees a Rails application and one or more gems being developed at the same time. This unfortunately breaks Rails autoloading. This article will sho...
“What drives me: learning new things, perfecting my craft, working with smart and amazing people, and helping my clients succeed.” —Ian, Engineering Manager “Pairing and the regular schedule are key — I get useful things done at work every day, while having time for the rest of my lif...
At the Toronto Startup Weekend Maker Edition , my team and I created a solution called Pawly . It’s a robot equipped with a camera that allows you to check-in on your pet at home from your mobile phone. After a whirlwind 54 hours, we were extremely excited to have placed second in the...
A little ditty that makes it really easy to wait for something Javascripty to happen…like a Javascript dialog to appear that gets populated from an AJAX call. The has_css? method call will wait until the element shows up and if it doesn’t show up before the Capybara timeout expires th...
Faraz Khan and Don Goodman-Wilson of Screenhero give an overview of the engineering challenges involved in building a high-quality video streaming system while also offering a detailed look at some of the ways Screenhero solves these problems.
Open up your hand-sized glowing rectangle. traverse a glorious landscape of stories, messages and photography anywhere in the universe. It’s really quite Incredible. Taps, swipes and drags take us anywhere we want to go. However, these views, navigation structures and transitions are ...
Just as Rails did for web development, the Arduino project combines powerful layers of abstraction with sensible defaults, making it easy to build hardware devices that sense and manipulate the physical world. So easy that artists, social workers, scientists, and even simple web progr...
Josiah Carlson presents a number of detailed examples of how to build on the strengths of Postgres while using Redis.
A couple of days ago, I attended the first Toronto edition of Wearable Wednesdays hosted at HackerYou ’s and Ladies Learning Code ’s new Learning Labs . It’s a tradition that started in San Francisco just a month ago . It was fascinating to get a firsthand look into this budding techn...
Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development practices. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global clients. Pivotal Labs Marketing is looking for a talented designer who is ambitious and dedicated to elevating the image of Pivotal Labs...
Pivotal Labs conducted an in-depth examination of the iOS and Android apps of the top banks in the UK to see if these institutions were in fact meeting the expectations of customers when it comes to mobile banking. This paper will explore: Findings and solutions to address the top cus...
The grammar of graphics: demystifying data visualisation with d3 Watch live streaming video from pivotallabs at livestream.com This talk will walk through some of the principles of data visualisation described in The Grammar of Graphics and show how they’ve informed some key features ...
Historically, if a client asks when a certain set of stories will be completed, we point to the Tracker backlog and show the date. We know if the velocity decreases, then the date is pushed out. That’s great in developer land, but as product managers we need some certainty that featur...
Circa’s presentation is primarily based on a process called “atomization” — news is broken down into smaller core elements, such as facts, stats, and quotes. It’s about making succinct points and offering coder-like version control on stories. When he first started building Circa, Gal...
The game of Chess is a Kingdom’s of strategy, problem solving and battle together in conquest. The pieces and tactics in the game of chess are not so different than those on a product team, just hopefully less bloodshed. The Pieces The King (♔, ♚) represents your Users . They can move...
This report examines the results of a survey commissioned by Pivotal Labs and conducted by Harris Interactive. With our exclusive survey data, you will learn: How much executives plan to invest in mobile in 2014 How much the average investment in mobile is changing from the current ye...
Originally posted at EmirWeb by Emir Hasanbegovic Second screen has been a buzzword for quite some time and rightfully so. Getting our tech gadgets to work as one has always been a desire. With the adoption of phones as the dominant personal computer over the last few years, we’ve nat...
diff --git a/config/initializers/simple_form.rb b/config/initializers/simple_form.rb index 553961b..e3f8d09 100644 --- a/config/initializers/simple_form.rb +++ b/config/initializers/simple_form.rb @@ -1,83 +1,126 @@ # Use this setup block to configure all options available in SimpleFo...
This post was co-authored with Shan Lian . Despite a consistent increase in mobile traffic, conversion rates remain low for smartphone devices. While 35% of all retail purchases occur on mobile, according to Marketing Charts , 65% of those transactions take place on tablet devices. Do...
Also posted at EmirWeb by Emir Hasanbegovic . Recently Pivotal Labs decided to push mobile devices to the limit by connecting multiple devices to one other in order to have them behave as one. Through the use of image recognition, optical character recognition, persistent low cost con...
Access Control is a simple idea. We want company employees to be able to delete inappropriate content; but random Users cannot. Here I propose one way to implement Access Control that has the particular advantage of being very general, very concise, and unlikely to be violated. I call...
Release is nearly a month old, so its well past time to look over the changes and uncover the features least discussed. This release received relatively exceptional social coverage. The attention largely due to the addition of Generational Garbage collection. A bit of exploration reve...
Visualizing Garbage Collection in Rubinius, JRuby and Ruby 2.0 Watch live streaming video from pivotallabs at livestream.com In this talk we’ll dive into Ruby internals and take a close look at an ugly topic: garbage collection. How do these Ruby VM’s allocate memory for new objects? ...
Less than a year ago, most analysts were recommending that mobile solutions be built strictly for smartphones. But fast-forward to today, and not only has tablet usage overtaken smartphone usage, but the adoption rate for tablets is outpacing that of smartphones. In practice, few busi...
Laura Klein offers a number of visual- and interaction-design tips for non-designers working to build their MVP.
Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development practices. We build consumer and enterprise web and mobile applications for global clients. We are currently looking for experienced, creative designers to join our team and help us continue to innovate in the field. We...
My first steps in learning Go were simple “scripts”; programs compiled and immediately executed by the go command-line tool. This was a great way to quickly get started; kind of similar to using a REPL. However, I soon wanted to learn how to structure larger programs, create reusable ...
