When 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.
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The 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.
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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.
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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.
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Rails 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.
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- debugging django SQL problems
- documenting convention for Rails routes
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- backspace in GNU screen with Apple Terminal, SSH, and Ubuntu
- jquery tooltip plugins
- django stuff
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- dumping and restoring databases from RDS
- connecting to Twitter via oauth using python
- python debugger in Django
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When you want to send a quick email in a ruby script, it's easy to
send it through Gmail. You don't have to worry about email
deliverability, and you get a record of it in your 'Sent Box'. There
were a few outdated blog posted on how to do this, but I had to make a
few tweaks before it worked for me.
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I haven't used python as my main day-to-day language, but I've already
run into problems with the tools and libraries that has had me pulling
my hair out.
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