I spent this weekend at Startup Weekend SF 2, and found one more reason to love rails: prototyping. There were at least 5 occasions where I stopped programming, looked over at my teammates and said, “have i mentioned i love rails?”.
I’m no DHH fanatic, but the joy of being able to build out a fully functional app with all my business models and logic implemented in less than 2 hours is just plain awesome. It let me spend the rest of my time working on what programmers should be working on — architecture, design, and feature iterations. By the time Sunday rolled around I had built some rather impressive intelligence under the hood of the bargain hunter project I was working on (it was essentially a Digg, but for online deals).
At the start of the project, I had a choice to stick with Rails or to try out Python (which I have no experience with). I chose rails mostly because I didn’t think I’d have enough time to learn a language from scratch. If I were to do it again, however, I’d probably be a bit more adventurous. All in all, I had an awesome time — the event was an overwhelming success with over 23 companies launched, and couldn’t have been done without some awesome organization by our very own @tylerwillis and co.
on 04/09/2009 | permalink | comments
If you’re a ruby/rails programmer looking to get into the hang of vim (or alternatively macvim), this is a handy cheat sheet you can print out for reference. It’s not a list of every command in the book, rather it’s a condensed list to help you get into the swing of things.
on 04/09/2009 | permalink | comments
The case statement actually does its comparison using the ruby “===” operator, and as a result can sometimes give unexpected results.
on 02/25/2009 | permalink | comments
An old post by Jamis Buck which outlines an excellent approach to extending rails route recognition. The post gives you a quick rundown of how to add support for additional parameters in your route declarations, allowing you to restrict those routes to a specific host, domain, or any other variable you define. I just used this trick to restrict some of our routes to a particular platform. Awesome stuff.
on 02/13/2009 | permalink | comments
The Benchmark module in ruby is not nearly as famous as it should be. Use it to easily check the execution time of a single method call, or specify multiple blocks to compare them against each other. What are you waiting for? Fire up that console and start optimizing!
on 02/12/2009 | permalink | comments
Recently, we integrated nkallen’s cache-money into our app. Cache-money is an awesome library built on top of ActiveRecord, with the intent of being the complete caching solution for your app. Definitely worth a look if you use memcached in rails.
on 02/11/2009 | permalink | comments
Noah Horton
Salman Ansari
Mike Wadhera
on 02/11/2009 | 
