While doing testing you learn that #Hackership is more than learning to code

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Today was Grey, rainy, gloomy, those kind of days that make hard wanting to do something. They are very common in Berlin but I don’t get use to them and I don’t like them.

If you add that, the first tweet I read while having breakfast, was about how the Spanish government wants to approve a law which will fine people between 30 thousand and 600 thousand euros if they do sit-ins in front of the Parliament, if they cover their faces in protests, if they take pictures of the police that they may find offensive (like the police beating up to death, as it happen a month ago in Barcelona), scratches as the ones done by La PAH, which consisted on groups of people affected by mortgages going in front of politicians or bankers houses with banners saying, “it is possible but they don’t want”, while in Spain there are more than 3 million empty houses, bankrupted banks have got the money from the bail out while evicting thousands of people from their houses because they cannot pay anymore the mortgage.

In Spain now there are more than 3 million people that live with less than 300€, there are 6 million of people unemployed, 1 million families with no income, education, health care system is being privatize, social cut are endless and one has to wake up reading a law that wants to avoid any kind of mobilization or protest that demands government to think about people rather that about the banks. No, sorry, today the day did not start in a good way.

I still decided to go walking to the hackership, maybe to walk would neutralize the feeling of impotence.

While trying to find the sense of being here, of getting inside of the hackership bubble, I remembered that a couple of days ago I re-read the hackership.org blog’s first post where it says

“Hackership is not just some place where you learn to code better, it’s about more than that.”

Just this sentence convinced me that Berlin was the right place to be for now, not sure for how long, but…

I’ve learned all that I know about technology in similar spaces, the hacklabs, in a more political context, more informal, a long time ago. When we founded the hacklab “wh2001-cielito lindo” in 2001, we wrote

“Because is not very useful and almost sad to learn alone things you can easily learn with others.
Because we don’t want to be isolated of the world that surrounds us.

Because each one’s room is too small to build computer networks.
Because the digital does not substitute the organic.
Because is joyful to learn and do things together”

So yes, I recognize the feeling in the hackership, is more than about coding, is like being home,
By the time I arrived to the Betahaus I was almost convinced that it was such a bad day.

I started reading a comment a friend posted in the blog yesterday about testing. He recommends:

Some tips: you can use shoulda and shoulda-matchers to simplify some common specs about validation and associations:https://github.com/thoughtbot/shoulda
Also, I recommend reading these best practices:
And some good tips by @dhh: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3159-testing-like-the-tsa

Then we did the stand up round, without the HS organizers, we are growing up 😛

I checked a couple of urls that I had on one of the endless tabs, they are nice views for calendars:
in form of gem: https://github.com/davidray/twitter-bootstrap-calendar

in form of template: https://github.com/Serhioromano/bootstrap-calendar

Time to commit to github the changes done yesterday. Though I try to do smaller commits locally, for now I will only commit once a day to github :-/

Then began dealing with migrations and associations in rails.
Since an event will have a belongs_to one location association and a location a has_many events association, I had to create the migration for that. The best thing to check the rails guides

Then when running event_spec.rb I had an error:

Loading development environment (Rails 4.0.1)
1.9.3p194 :001 > e = Event.new(:name => '3d lala', :type => "lalala" , :day => Date.today)
ActiveRecord::SubclassNotFound: Invalid single-table inheritance type: lalala is not a subclass of Event

So it turn up that the word “type” is kind of a reserved keyword, that gives this error, so time to rename the column in the table,for that

first do a migration
âžœ webcalendar git:(master) ✗ rails g migration RenameTypeInEventsTable

Then open the migration and do the “renaming” part

class RenameTypeInEventsTable < ActiveRecord::Migration
def change
rename_column :events, :type, :event_type
end
end

Then do

rake db:migrate

Now everything should be fine 🙂

Then doing some reading, checking codeschool rspec course, to implement some of the things in my tests.

And finally discovering cool improvements to the working environment

tmux for emacs and rails for emacs

So it looks like tomorrow will be the day to spend sometime trying to improve the working environment 🙂

So finally, it was not a bad day, thanks to be surrounded by nice people