Norbert Taylor's Profile

On our latest project at EastMedia, we’ve been using Ruby’s Forwardable delegation library to help avoid violating the Law of Demeter. Unfortunately, Forwardable’s interface has a few problems:

* It doesn’t read well.
* It requires you to remember the order of the arguments.
* It has no support for automatically prefixing method names.
* It has no support for automatically setting up writers and accessors.

Back in February, Jay Fields wrote an extension for Forwardable that resolved the last two points, but he didn’t try to address the first two. In a comment on that post, David Chelimsky suggested a possible fluent interface for delegation, but to my knowledge no one had built and released it.

Here are some examples of what I came up with:

Models in Sequel are based on the Active Record pattern described by Martin Fowler (http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/activeRecord.html). A model class corresponds to a table or a dataset, and an instance of that class wraps a single record in the model's underlying dataset.

OpenQA says: Selenium is a UI test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. Those tests can run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.

When working with Rails, it is tempting to conceptualize ActiveRecord#find into some genie that magically reaches into your database and pulls back the records matching the criteria you specified. The reality is a bit more complex, and sadly lacking in genies.

If you’re in the tech industry, and in marketing, you should be paying attention to what’s happening on twitter. There’s even search tools that can help you find discussions and memes. Also, if you’re trying to reach early adopters, these are tools for you. This really reminds me of the the whole blogging industry in 2005, it’s the same type of pros and cons –it’s just much smaller now. If you don’t meet these criterion, then it may not be for you, always remember to find the audience you’re trying to reach first.

Presumably, most of you reading this site “get it” about social media. You understand that it’s about the conversation. You understand that transparency is important. You get the power of raises voices in bringing about change, and how these new tools deliver these abilities to individuals and organizations alike. Sure, you might learn the occasional thing here, but for the most part, you’re the expert that people turn to in your own personal circle for information on how this all works.

Work of any kind requires an understanding of the appropriate tools for the job, and social media is no different. You can’t pitch hay with a shovel, and you can’t dig a ditch with a pitchfork. Here are some serving suggestions for a set of social media tools. The actual applications will change, over time, because technology does that. But the basic functions should evolve a little more slowly.