What’s the difference between a decorator and a strategy, composite, and presenter? Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots tells all.

There's a single method in your Cucumber suite right now that could silently allow regressions and ambiguity to slip in without you ever knowing. Do you know what it is?

How do you test your gems across multiple versions of its dependencies (like Rails or Capybara)? Try thoughtbot's Appraisal gem.

Factory Girl release candidates were cut this week. There's a great-looking new syntax and many new conveniences.

thoughtbot open sourced copycopter_client a few minutes ago. It's the client library to a corresponding service for editing copy in your live Rails app.

Do you know the Twiddle Wakka? I thought this was one of the more interesting things I took away from Rubyconf via Jeremy Hinegardner's Anthropology of Ruby talk.

Many people think of Shoulda as a context framework for Ruby tests. It's really two libraries, however. One is a context framework and the other is a set of Rails matchers that only depend on Ruby. This means they can be used in any testing framework (Test::Unit, RSpec, whatever). This post has more details, including how to write your own matchers.

Clearance now uses only cookies with a long expiration.

Assuming people using shared computers can't remember to log out is insulting at best and annoying to everyone else that has exclusive access.

Someone recently asked thoughtbot to do “vim on Rails” screencasts. So, we're responding with this experiment. Let us know what you want to see and we'll try to improve things the next time around.

We found a UI edge case that was not as "edge" as we thought: already confirmed users re-clicking their confirmation link. As a result, we altered the underlying library to improve user experience.

Analysis paralysis: access control is an article exploring custom authorization ("access control") in your Rails app using techniques you already know: ActiveRecord associations and finders, current_user. Inherited Resources is also on display to minimize mistakes and keep code standard and clean.

HIGH VOLTAGE is a new Rails engine from thoughtbot for static pages.

Test Spies make isolation testing easier & maintain the same four-phase test order as unmocked tests.

Have too many slideshows in your organization? Have a jones for open source tools? Text files? Git? Same here. Give Slidedown a whirl.

Registration is open this week for the 2009 Rails Rumble. So start talking ideas and finding teammates at Rumblestiltskin and try to win the Rails Rumble championship belt sponsored by thoughtbot.

The latest version of Shoulda works with RSpec. Check out the announcement blog posts for ActiveRecord matchers (last month) and ActionController matchers (today).

Using Umbrella Today? as a case study, thoughtbot will provide Advanced Rails training at Rockefeller Center, NYC on Friday, December 5th. Topics covered include Rails best practice patterns, refactoring with confidence, Test Driven Development with ease, and contributing back to the community with plugins and gems.