DHH wrote this: Myth #2: Rails is expected to crash 400 times/day – a response to a myth about Rails processes regularly needing restarts.
I’m a big Rails hacker, it’s 90% of what I’ve done for years. I’ve designed and developed these apps: Tiktrac, Ebiwrite, Helipad, Deadline, Loom and Reuters Real Estate, this blog, not to mention work for smaller clients I …
Here’s a personal project I’ve been working on for a while: http://deadlineapp.com/
I find calendars hard to use but I like writing, so I wanted to create a calendar that uses natural language parsing to make sense of text. You can search for words or dates, so typing “next week” shows you all your events for next week.
When I designed the interface I threw away all the typical web app stuff. There’s barely any navigation, no footer, no extra links for “account”, etc. When you hover the logo minimal navigation appears, and…
One of the great things about the Future of Web Apps expo was how polite the speakers were. I caught up with a few during the conference and in the parties afterwards. Simon and I had a chat with Alvin Woon from Plurk (who likes his beers apparently), the guys from Swirrl, the people from Meebo and PhoneFromHere.
I also wandered around the Friday night party weeding out the hackers from the Diggnation fans, thankful to find fellow Ruby and …
This is a summary of the talks I went to at the Future of Web Apps on the second day of the conference. Read the first part here: FOWA 08: Day 1 Talks
Tim changed his talk to one about how to survive in the current economic climate. He basically described my career (I graduated in 2001 – during the dot com crash) so I felt some encouragement from his ideas.
I visited the Future of Web Apps conference last Thursday and Friday in London. The talks were by large excellent, and the speakers were personable and gave detailed answers to questions. Talks were split into Business and Developer, which made choosing difficult for me because I’m involved in both. Videos of all the talks are here: All FOWA 08 Videos
Kevin’s talk was given in a more …
Here’s an idea I’ve been playing with today: Captor, a GUI for Capistrano management. It’s a very rough prototype right now.
Goals:
Caveats:
I recently posted my top 5 uses for Capistrano over at Helicoid Insider—including juicy code snippets!
I like Capistrano a lot. It’s now doing all kinds of things to ease my workflow, from backing up servers to providing me with detailed signup statistics for each of my web apps. Whilst I’m still the only developer designing and building 4 successful web apps I need all the help I can get, so I’ve naturally cobbled together a range of software techniques to help….
I’ve just finished writing an article about how I built a single-sign on server in Rails:
Building our centralised authentication system
It was actually an incredibly rewarding experience. I’ve written up design notes, rationale and provided tips on avoiding problems.
Here’s a JavaScript snippet intended for Rails that I just posted over on my company’s technical blog. It displays the error message for each field when you click on the field, making it easier to see exactly what went wrong when saving a record.
Read it here: Dynamic Rails error help
Guerilla Software Marketing Strategies is an article I wrote for Biznik about our experiences marketing my web applications. It covers (proven!) free techniques for marketing your software.
If you find this useful I’m thinking about following it up with an article about what didn’t work for us.
I just posted this article to my company’s blog: Analytics with Capistrano
If you want realtime stats on your web site, why not try using Capistrano to collect data and create graphs and tables? It’s pretty easy to do this, and the beauty is you don’t need to make any modifications to your application.
My Rails tutorial (part 1 of 4) has been published in Linux Format 108. It shows you how to build a Rails-powered photo gallery, by using basic techniques and popular plugins.
Grab it from your favourite newsagent and let me know what you think!
I’ve been writing technical articles on this blog for 3 years, and never mentioned much about my personal or professional life. Here’s what’s been going down:
Changes is a fast and friendly diff tool. You can quickly list files that have changed in a project, and view differences between files. It also works with Subversion and Git (and several other version control systems), so it will fit right into your typical workflow. Oh, and it also has a TextMate bundle.
Changes gets perhaps the highest accolade for a mac application: I like Changes so much it actually has a permanent place in m…
Welcome to Rapid Rails Part 3: Desktop mastery, the third article in my series focussing on making Rails (and yourself) faster.
A good programmer recognises when to reuse and therefore reduce code. A great programmer applies this tendency to their own workflow. Whether you use an IDE or text editor, working with Rails can be made more pleasant and efficient by observing commonly performed tasks and simplifying them.
The examples given below have a heavy bias toward TextMate, Vim and Mac OS. If you work in Windows or Linux, at the very least consider the following 10 ideas.
This is part 2 of the Rapid Rails series. Part 1 featured tips on how to work more efficiently with Rails by making the most of the bundled and related command line tools. This part discusses how to make your Rails application perform faster, with particular focus on server optimisation. Why? Because systems administration requires a very different skill set to programming, and I’ve been often been expected to manage sysadmin tasks on my Rails contracts—and I bet you have too!
I’ve included real-world e…
Rapid Rails is a series of articles containing succinct tips to increase your productivity when working with Ruby on Rails. This is the first part, and shows you how to make the most of the command-line tools that come with Rails.
The Rails generator script (found inside an application’s directory at script/generate) allows you to quickly create templates for anything you need within Rails. As well as models and controllers, you can also use it to write entire migrations:
scr…
This article is an introduction to testing Rails plugins. It’s a relatively lengthy post, so if you’re reading this in an RSS reader flag it and come back when you’re not too busy. It follows the “taxonomy” style of my previous plugin article, A taxonomy of Rails plugins, where examples are used from open source software.
Knowledge of both unit and functional testing is assumed. The following topics are covered:
There are now almost 1000 entries in the main resource for Ruby on Rails plugins, Agile Web Development’s Plugins Directory. Of these, 596 have repositories listed that are accessible. I wanted to see how many of these plugins came with some form of tests, so I created a spider (using a web spider library) and performed some basic analysis on each repository.
After reading a few magazines, and watching two entire TV shows, the spider came back with a result: 54% of the plugins have tests.
It’s amazing to …
Start using Test Driven Development today is a post I wrote over on my company’s blog. It covers how TDD has improved my work since I started Helicoid Limited, and how you can start using TDD right now.
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