The first cohort of Viking Code School officially wrapped up last week. It was a great adventure. I got to help some amazing students experience an amazing amount of growth in 3 months. I also got to build some tests for the VCS website...

As I started work on a new Rails project recently, one of my first priorities was to set up my test environment and tools so I could use test driven development (TDD) from the beginning. Here are the steps I took, some snags I ran into, and some things I learned along the way...

Ruby is a beautiful programming language and a fantastic language for beginners.  It's clear, simple syntax makes it accessible, and it's amazing how much you can get done in a few short, simple lines of code.  Combine Ruby with the Rails framework, and newcomers can hit the ground running fast.  This speed is both a wonderful and a terrible thing...