Coded and used by the Github team,
Resque is a Ruby queue for
processing background jobs built on top of
Redis. So far, I'm really enjoying
the simple setup and simple API. The documentation gives a lot of
good background information, and it's been working well overall.
Follow the jump for a day-to-day usage reference.
Three weeks ago, I started as a full time software developer at
Intridea. It's been an absolute blast so far,
but it happened so quickly that I'm still somewhat dazed at how I got
here. Just two month ago, I was in Israel and Egypt visiting
Wendy and working on
Outspokes, and now I'm working with energetic
and talented individuals; all of whom I've never seen in real life
before, but many of whom I've heard of in the Ruby community.
I started working with MongoDB a few days
ago. To oversimplify, think of Mongo as a really big and fast hash
that gets saved to disk. It lets you query, retrieve, and manipulate
data in Javascript and JSON. I
had a ton of work to do, so I didn't get a chance to explore the
technology as much as I would've liked. Today, after getting a solid
night's sleep, I got a chance to experiment more. Read on to get some
quick tips about writing Mongo queries and generating reports from the
Mongo shell.
Delivering email is easy. Having that email actually get received is freaking hard. In this era rife with spammers, if you don't jump through several hoops of verifying yourself, your messages will be automatically marked as spam during transit, and never see the light of an inbox. I didn't realize how tricky this was when I first started sending out email for Outspokes, but when our account activation and notification emails were always being delivered to the spam folder, I dug deeper and learned quite a lot. Follow the jump to save your future emails.
Read moreWhen I started planning out Beerpad, I wanted to focus on fun beer ideas. I'm perfectly capable of setting up an environment for a Rails application to run in, but I didn't want to waste a morning doing a bunch of chores and have nothing but a "Hello World" page to show for it. Once I had my designs, I wanted to prototype the juicy real features right away. Enter Heroku. Heroku is a service for hosting Ruby webapps. I've been interested in the service since I saw Adam Wiggins demo it at a SVC Ruby Meetup. Heroku is a one-stop serivce for starting a database-backed, Rack compatible, Ruby webapp. They use git to version control your code, Thin to serve your traffic, and Postgresql to store your data. They also have add-ons that webapps may find useful. I've been looking for an excuse to play with the service, and Beerpad fit the bill perfectly. Follow the jump for my experiences.
Read moreThe gray and wet weather outside put me in an gloomy mood, so I didn't want to write any 'unhappy' code and regret it later. Instead, I headed to Cup of Joe on the corner of Dizengoff and Gordon to read 37Signal's book 'Getting Real' while enjoying a creamy cappuccino. Follow the jump for a short book review.
Read more
To spice things up from
Outspokes and consulting, Arthur, Jeff and I
held our first informal hackathon at Mo Joe
Cafe on a sunny
Saturday morning. The three of us had no real goal other than to get
our geek on in good company. I had a great time brainstorming and
creating my deliciously refreshing beer review site named
Beerpad. Follow the jump for details on the project.
Andrew noticed that his beer reviews weren't showing up on beerpad after he published them. His reviews were saved in the database and showed up on redeploy. I smelled a caching bug. Digging a little deeper, I found out that caches_page and expire_page are overridden on Heroku to set http caching headers rather than write a file to the local filesystem. While I was fixing this bug, I picked up on a lot of useful details about Rails action caching and configuration. Details and my fix after the jump.
Read moreRails has two methods of adding external libraries to a project, rubygems and plugins. There are also different ways to manage these external libraries. Here are some conventions I've picked up over the years for managing dependencies in development and deployment as painless and maintainable as possible.
Read more