Top all-time · #6732
Pat Maddox
Personal blog · patmaddox.com/blogprogrammingwebproductivity
Pat Maddox writes ~patmaddox, a personal blog at patmaddox.com about programming, web and productivity. Since 2009, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Sh: Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Pat Maddox's blog for Rails development advice, including tips on working with legacy databases, and for the bootstrapped product Storemapper, which reached $50k a year.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Sh: Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-03
What Hacker News says?
Figure out who your audience is. The easiest is to pick someone like you or who wants to be like you. Are you a rubydev? You can probably solve problems for aspiring ruby devs, etc. Consultants can solve common consulting problems, (brennan dunn did ( http://doubleyourfreelancing.com/rate/ ). Find out where your audience hangs out online (forums, reddit, hackernews, blogs, etc). Start systematically going through th…
Comment linking /rubysteps/
on “Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50k/year in 2 years”Submitted Poof and then Rails was gone as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI agree. If you're taking over an old crappy Rails project of reasonable complexity, think about using Pat Maddox's excellent tips on working with legacy databases. http://www.patmaddox.com/blog/railsconf_2009_legacy_rails It's useful to get the app under a comprehensive test acceptance test suite. Then you can rewrite and feel comfortable everything is still working.
Comment linking /blog/railsconf_2009_legacy_rails
on “Things You Should Never Do, Part I”Submitted What I Like About vim as a story · 23 points
HN discussionTotally agree, that's why you need good MVC separation and you test those layers separately. The models testing is obvious. What you're referring to there is controller testing. In Rails/Rspec, the way you do that is by mocking/stubbing the models (so you're only testing the controller logic). Then you pass in the parameters that would come in from the web, and check that the controller code (which should be fairly…
Comment linking /blog/2007/9/15/easy-controller-tests-and-expressing-intent-through-expectations
on “Unit testing is not (generally) useful”Submitted How a Coding Obsession Killed My Startup as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fluid interfaces and little objects as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Behavioral methods in ActiveRecord as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Sh: Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Technical Debt as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to hire programmers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Are you punching your users in the face? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Relative shell script includes with realpath on FreeBSD as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted "X sucks" sucks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Unit and Functional Tests are as Useful as 100% Code Coverage as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Four lessons from the Rails Rumble as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Behavioral methods in ActiveRecord as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
