The Engineering Blog | Grouper Engineering Blog

The other day, purely by accident, I discovered that lurking behind our cute little factory girl tests was an apocolypse of angry zombies. “REALLY?,”you ask. Well no, not actual zombies.
But let me back up a second and explain.
Factory Girl is a testing helper library we use to simplify data creation in Rails. In it’s basic form, it makes creating test objects this simple:...

Recently at Grouper we stopped configuring our staging environment with a staging.rb config file and instead started using ENV variables.
Why would we do this? The twelve factor app says it all. But in summary, multiple configuration files are problematic:...

At Grouper, like a lot of the Rails community, we use Resque to manage our asynchronous background jobs. It lets us do everything from sending emails to processing charges and most of the time everything works perfectly.
The Problem
But sometimes things don’t work quite as well as we’d like. Recently we ran into a common problem with Resque deployments on Heroku – our jobs were being sent TERM signals in the middle of processing....

Internationalization? Even the name is so complicated that we need a shorthand (i18n) to talk about it.
Yes, the process of internationalizing your site can be pretty painful. Patterns that work well in English (like dynamically inserting prepositions into a string) suddenly don’t work when you have multiple languages to consider. Granted, it&rsquo...