I picked up a neat TextMate trick while pair programming with Justin Gehtland on Monday. Check out a directory from a Subversion repository and open it in TextMate. Click on the root directory of the project and hold down Ctrl-Shift-A. A menu will appear allowing you to select from a … Continue reading
This is another brief reminder that I’ll be giving a preview of my RailsConf talk at tonight’s Ruby meetup. The meetup starts at 7 PM at Red Hat headquarters. Hope to see you there!
For those who live in the RTP area, I’ll be giving a preview of my RailsConf talk at the Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade meetup on April 17th. We meet at Red Hat headquarters on NCSU’s Centennial Campus at 7:00 PM. I’ll be talking about Teascript, homesteading, and building niche web apps … Continue reading
Let’s say we have a method on a model that looks something like this: def last_assignment assignments.find(:first, : order => ‘created_at DESC’) end We call this method several dozen times from various other methods on the model. The problem is, every time we call the method a new database query … Continue reading
Have you ever realized that the default Rails date helpers allow invalid dates to be selected? I ran into an issue yesterday where one of my Teascript users attempted to select a date of November 31, 2007. That date obviously doesn’t exist. Instead of failing with a validation error, however, … Continue reading
Tim O’Brien recently cataloged the top four myths that often prevent Rails from being used in Enterprise settings. From performance to flexibility, he does a thorough job covering many the objections that I’ve heard raised myself when proposing Rails as a possible solution. It can be frustrating to be in … Continue reading
The Ruby community in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina has been growing by leaps and bounds lately, in large part due to the fantastic job Nathaniel Talbott has been doing with the local Ruby Brigade. Another sign of the growing interest in Ruby and Rails in the … Continue reading
This is just a reminder from your friendly neighborhood agilist that the new Agile RTP user group has its first meeting in Cary tonight. Read more about it on Jared’s blog. This sounds like a great opportunity to meet other agile-minded people in the area and listen to an interesting … Continue reading
37 Signals’ latest web application, Highrise, is now open for business. They offer a free account so you can try out the service without laying down any dinero. Looks like a useful tool. It’ll be interesting to see how tightly it integrates with Basecamp.
Have you wondered how to effectively synch bookmarks between work and home? I discovered the Foxmarks plugin for Firefox almost by accident last week and it does the trick for me. Better still, it’s fast and lightweight, the perfect companion for an agile developer. Foxmarks installs into Firefox in seconds. … Continue reading