Why another rails blog?
For about the last month, I've been building business applications with Ruby on Rails and loving it. In the course of that time, I've hit a number of road blocks and had to figure out how to get around...
View ArticlePreserving your data when changing your schema
I've been working with rails in an agile model ... build something, get it working & tested, move on to the next thing. As a result, my underlying schema is continually evolving. Mostly that's in...
View ArticleInstalling QTRuby on Mac OSX
Over the last few weeks, I've been working to get QT3 working with Ruby. I've been using the book Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby by Caleb Tennis published by Pragmatic Programers...
View ArticleTalk on RDebug from the SF Ruby Meetup
I had a chance to speak at the August 13th Ruby Meetup in San Francisco. Here are the slides about RDebug and using it with Rails.The slides
View ArticleNice Post on Controllers that extend an API
I just read Nathan's post on RESTful controllers:REST: From theory to practiceI found this article helpful. One of the things about RESTful applications that always felt awkward was how to go beyond...
View ArticleCool way to test controllers that are protected by an authentication system
Whenever you've got a Rails app that has a login system, you tend to run into problems testing your controllers because the before_filter :login_required (or whatever you've called it) fires before you...
View ArticleRSpec route_for & params_from with Nested Routes & Custom Methods
I was just writing some route specs for nested routes that used PUT methods and it took some searching and experimentation to get it to work. I didn't find a lot of relevant documentation, so hopefully...
View ArticleDRYing Up Views Between Browser and Mobile Versions (across MIME types)
I was working on an app and decided that in order for it to be truly usable on mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, etc), it needed to have views that were tailored for small screens.I started by...
View ArticleWatching the International Space Station
Allison, Jessie and I just got back from sitting on Skyline Boulevard watching the International Space Station shoot across the sky. It was super bright and it's very cool to watch this "star" streak...
View ArticleUsing a modal layout with redbox for popup windows
In my current project, I've been using redbox for popup windows. By default, these come up as a plain white box, so I wanted to style them with a colored area for a title, a region at the bottom for...
View ArticleClearing out content in content_for
In rails, multiple calls to content_for append their body's together and yield the concatenation of all the calls. Conceptually, this looks something like:<% content_for :title do %>Hello<%...
View ArticleGreat resources for getting caching working on your rails app
I spent some time today getting caching of static assets up for a project I'm working on. Before picking a direction, I did a bunch of reading to understand different approaches. At the end of it all,...
View ArticleBenchmarking Functional vs Data Based Lists in Ruby
At GoGaRuCo 2010 (Golden Gate Ruby Conference), Jim Weirich (@jimweirich) gave a great keynote on Functional and Object Oriented programming in Ruby. In the pres, he threw up some code to implement...
View ArticleUsing Capistrano and Rake for DB Maintenance
I know that periodically it's a good idea to run analyze table on tables in your mysql database so they have updated statistics for the query optimizer to use.Until now, I've generally done it manually...
View Article.deliver_later not working in rake tasks in development for a Rails 5 app
I was just working on a rake task in a Rails 5.0.1 application that sends out emails. I was using the default setup of the :async adapter for ActiveJob (development mode). I was also using the...
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