I’m closing this blog, at least for now. Follow me on Twitter?
- Reel Roulette — an easy way to find motion designers
- KZAK! — a web-based jukebox
- The Unofficial Pygments API — syntax highlighting via google app engine
- Static — a super simple rails cms for heroku
- Flowcoder — code sharing powered by twitter
- Click that Button — a button that you can click
- h8ter — what do you hate?
- El Dorado — a full-stack community web app
- WordPress plugins and themes — secure files, force ssl, etc
Perhaps you’ve been receiving annoying emails about exceptions like this in your Rails apps:
A ActionView::MissingTemplate occurred in posts#destroy:
Missing template posts/destroy with {:formats=>[:html], :locale=>[:en, :en], :handlers=>[:rjs, :rhtml, :rxml, :erb, :builder]} in view paths...This exception is raised when you’re missing the template for responding to a request of a certain format. So, if the browser requested HTML and you only expected to receive JS, you might simply modify your controller action like so:
respond_to do |format|
format.js
endThis specifies that you’re only going to respond to JS requests, and any others will be served a 406 “not_acceptable” response, which will quiet down that exception noise.
Have you handled these in some other way? If so, please let me know!
Consistent Hashing in memcache-client
paperplanes. The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing
Welcome to the Age of Overparenting – Boston Magazine – bostonmagazine.com
You’ve Probably Read Enough | Ben’s Blog
To get started on one of your lingering interests, you probably don’t need to read about it as much as you think. Go. Do it. And learn from there.
Profiling Rails startup with DTrace – Tender Lovemaking
Twine : Listen to your world, talk to the Internet by Supermechanical — Kickstarter
Knyle Style Sheets — Warpspire
I heard you liked files (Episode #228 – December 6, 2011)
Riding Rails: What’s new in Edge Rails: EXPLAIN
You Aren’t Who You Hang Out With | Mike Industries
Don’t Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)
Creating an API // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
Adds test spies to mocha
monitor your rack apps in production
fancyBox – Fancy jQuery Lightbox Alternative
fancyBox is a tool that offers a nice and elegant way to add zooming functionality for images, html content and multi-media on your webpages. It is built at the top of the popular JavaScript framework jQuery and is both easy to implement and a snap to customize.
Custom File Inputs with a Bit of jQuery | Viget Inspire
File inputs are notorious for being a pain to style across all browsers.
Fast, easy, realtime metrics using Redis bitmaps «
A resque plugin; provides retry, delay and exponential backoff support for resque jobs.
Configuration for Rails, the Right Way | The Carbon Emitter
One little known secret is that Rails 3 allows you to define your own configuration elements trivially.
You don’t need a merchant account or gateway. Stripe handles everything, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to your bank account.
Solving Cucumber’s Problems — Elabs
Turnip parses Gherkin feature files and runs them in RSpec. You run your feature files the exact same way you would run a normal spec file, and they are automatically run when you run your RSpec suite.
PhantomJS: Headless WebKit with JavaScript API
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice | Kalzumeus Software
tallgreentree/omniauth-37signals – GitHub
37signals OAuth2 Strategy for Omniauth 1.0
Moment.js is a lightweight javascript date library for parsing, manipulating, and formatting dates.
Stacking the Bricks « Unicornfree
This lesson was specifically crafted for you: The smart person who has the skills and the know-how to execute… but isn’t sure where or how to get started on what seems like a gargantuan task.
glennr/uber-glory-tmbundle – GitHub
Uber Textmate macros to make your life glorious. Well they mostly strip whitespace.
The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)
My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.
We like playing music at the GitHub office. Everyone has their own library on their own machines, and everyone except for me plays shitty music. Play is designed to make office music more palatable.
Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.
Day-O is a simple menu bar clock replacement with a simple calendar for your Mac.
Mud Rooms, Red Letters, and Real Priorities | 43 Folders
Yield Thought, I swapped my MacBook for an iPad+Linode
Fast Rails Tests – Corey Haines – Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2011
In this talk, I will go over some techniques for keeping your test suite lean and fast. Along the way, we’ll discuss the design improvements that come out of these changes.
Hyperbole and a Half: Adventures in Depression
And that’s how my depression got so horrible that it actually broke through to the other side and became a sort of fear-proof exoskeleton.
CSS: Taking control of the cascade – (37signals)
Using CSS sprites with Rails helper methods – (37signals)
Why We Moved Off The Cloud at Mixpanel Engineering
After getting fed up with variable cloud performance, I decided to make the move to dedicated hardware.
For the past year or so we’ve been telling people about Hubot, our amazing Campfire bot. We have a lot of fun working on Hubot. He makes us laugh, he ships our code, he is the interface to our CI server, and a whole lot more. Over the last year, he’s grown bigger and messier. So we decided to rewrite him from scratch, open source him, and share him with everyone.
Over the years we’ve added quite a bit of stuff to GitHub. Sometimes we ship huge features, sometimes we ship small, lesser-known bonus features.
A Modern Guide to Threads | The Carbon Emitter
“Algorithm” is Not a Four-Letter Word
Web Development Blog | Ruby on Rails Web Development | Viget Extend
When solving a particular problem in an OO language, it often makes sense to take a step back and think about the conceptual entities involved and how they collaborate with one another. By adhering to some basic design principles, notably the separation of concerns and encapsulation, we have a solution that is easier to understand and maintain.
Understanding the Rails Logger | Grinding Gears
Introducing the YouTube Insult Generator
Why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster – Pat Shaughnessy
iOS 5: Tips, Tricks & Hidden Features
Daring Fireball: The iPhone 4S
Why programs become territorial – (37signals)
Until you’re ready to delay things you really want done, it’s fruitless to bemoan that parts of the code base territorial.
Steve Jobs and drug policy – Salon.com
MicroGems: five minute RubyGems – Jeff Kreeftmeijer
An 8 hour work day with exercise is more valuable than an 10 hour work day without. Justifying daily exercise as your number one priority is such an easy thing to do. If exercise isn’t your number one priority, your priorities are wrong.
Rands In Repose: Building Serendipity
The training wheels came off | Aslak Hellesøy
What’s So Great About Siri? | Cult of Mac
Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011 | Epicenter | Wired.com
14km – Mocha doesn’t play nice with Rails 3 & Bundler
After an hour or two digging around, I stumbled across a post on the Mocha mailing-list that mentioned ordering problems with Mocha and Test::Unit. Sure enough, if I rearranged the modified require lines so that Test::Unit was loaded after Mocha
How I name my apps – Zach Waugh
bassnode/bundler_timer – GitHub
Logs the time you spend waiting for bundler
#101: Wiki page explaining how to use rbenv in production .. – Issues – sstephenson/rbenv – GitHub
Read on (Sinatra: New feature release, Contrib and Recipes)
Timelines.com Sues Facebook, Says Its New Timeline Feature Could “Eliminate” Them – TechCrunch
Kinda cranky pizza guy – chicagotribune.com
Amazon Kindle Fire explodes onto tablet scene – Chicago Sun-Times
detailed account (Drift: an iPad app for GitHub Gists)
Large Ruby File Downloads Done Right! – Dan Watsons Coding Zen
What is needed is to download and stream the file directly to disk leaving the RAM well alone.
textmate/ruby.tmbundle – GitHub
TextMate support for Ruby
Jason Fried on Learning What Your Employees Really Think | Inc.com
sstephenson/rbenv-vars – GitHub
An rbenv plugin that safely sets global and per-project environment variables
Bundler’s Best Kept Secret – Pat Shaughnessy
This week I just discovered Bundler’s best kept secret: the bundle viz command will generate a network graph showing the dependencies among all the different gems used by your Ruby app.
How Batman can Help you Build Apps – Shopify
I’d like to give a quick tour of what makes Batman different and why you might want to use it instead of the other amazing frameworks available today.
Bare-bone, stripped-down Devise | Plataforma Tecnologia Blog
It is important to keep in mind that Devise was built by us to be flexible and capable of handling different requirements from different clients, so it is PlataformaTec’s priority to have it as flexible as possible!
A framework for writing Campfire bots
Pogodan | per-app environment variables with pow and rbenv
However with RVM we’d been taking advantage of the per-directory .rvmrc files to set per-application environment variables for configuration (e.g. DB URIs, API keys, etc.) on our dev machines.
summarized the changes over 1.9.2 (Ruby 1.9.3 Release Candidate 1 Released (What’s new?))
A First Look at BankSimple | BankSimple Blog
Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right « Katz Got Your Tongue?
dwilkie/carrierwave_direct – GitHub
Process your uploads in the background by uploading directly to S3
gzigzigzeo/carrierwave-meta – GitHub
File’s metadata saving plugin for carrierwave
Dump and load relational objects between Ruby environments
Preview mail in the browser instead of sending
What Self can teach us about the future of JavaScript /by @assaf
[FYI: historic] The desicive moment of the language name Ruby. (Re: [ANN] ruby 1.8.1)
GoRuCo 2011 – Jeremy Ashkenas – CoffeeScript for the Well-Rounded Rubyist on Vimeo
Animated GIFs Capture Stanley Kubrick’s Most Immortal Scenes | Co. Design
Open Source Mac OS X Git client
How to use iPhone 4 as a Pay-Go iPhone
How to setup an iPhone 4 as a Pay-Go phone
A fully featured HTML5 WYSIWYG editor written in CoffeeScript on top of the Rails 3.1 asset stack
Anything in the master branch is deployable
To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie: new-oauth2-scopes)
Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server
When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request
After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master
Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately
Ruby on Rails Guides: Ruby on Rails 3.1 Release Notes
Highlights in Rails 3.1: Streaming, Reversible Migrations, Assets Pipeline, jQuery as the default JavaScript library
Mobile development with HTML5 | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
This post will go over some key concepts and features of HTML5, setting the stage for more advanced subjects.
the largest and most reliable Postgres service in the world
sstephenson/sprockets at v2.0.0 – GitHub
Rack-based asset packaging system
10.6: Terminal and ‘focus follows mouse’ modification – Mac OS X Hints
defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string NO
Active Record batch processing in parallel processes
My semi-educated guess on the Amazon tablet
History.js gracefully supports the HTML5 History/State APIs (pushState, replaceState, onPopState) in all browsers. Including continued support for data, titles, replaceState. Supports jQuery, MooTools and Prototype. For HTML5 browsers this means that you can modify the URL directly, without needing to use hashes anymore. For HTML4 browsers it will revert back to using the old onhashchange functionality.
paperplanes. Web Operations 101 For Developers
cloudHQ for Dropbox – Basecamp, Dropbox and Google Docs
Integrate Dropbox, Basecamp, and Google Docs
Access attribute values directly, without instantiating ActiveRecord objects
No images, no external CSS
No dependencies
Highly configurable
Resolution independent
Works in all major browsers, including IE6
Smaller than an animated GIF (3K minified, 1.7K gzipped)
MIT License
an IRB alternative and runtime developer console
Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.
Skeleton: Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development
A Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development
Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites.
It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
What they’re “protecting” us from – Anil Dash
It’s a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale.
Store user timelines in Riak
A Gentle Introduction to CarrierWave | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
CarrierWave is self-described as a “classier solution for file uploads for Rails, Sinatra and other Ruby web frameworks.” Although I’ve head it referred to as “a new kid on the block” it’s actually quite an old gem. The initial checkin is from August 2008 and the first release was in March 2009. The original name was Merb::Upload and it started without support for Rails.
Share links instantly between computers – SendTab
SendTab is a browser extension that lets you share links instantly between computers.
A really thin wrapper around ruby-build for rbenv.
Rendering Rails 3.1 assets to string – Phusion Corporate Blog
Understanding “Prototypes” in JavaScript « Katz Got Your Tongue?
ignore the code: More on Software Patents
it is simply not possible to create any non-trivial piece of software that doesn’t violate hundreds of patents. As a result, you can’t release software without putting yourself into a position where you might suddenly lose all of your money.
Why software patents are not fixable – Marco.org
On Being A Journeyman Software Developer: Being honest vs Making excuses
Often times, we choose to be in certain situations and then, rather than admitting that the situation is bad and dysfunctional, then convince ourselves — and justify to others — that this is the only way it can be. While we are free to choose trade-offs for whatever situation we place ourselves in, it is important to be honest with ourselves about the causes of the situation.
kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer – GitHub
GCC Installer for OSX! Without Xcode!
At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation.
Nodeload2: Downloads Reloaded – GitHub
Simple Ruby version management
Bulkr: Backup, download flickr photos & sets (Mac, Windows & Linux)
Bulkr is the complete solution to backup, browse & download photos on Flickr. Install it free.
Ava’s 5 girls and 3 boys !! – a set on Flickr
Ava’s 5 girls and 3 boys !!
has_many :bugs, :through => :rails
After moving to Sam Stephenson’s awesome Pow, not being able to use ruby-debug was the primary obstacle I had adjusting to my new development environment. But as it turns out, it’s very simple to use ruby-debug with Pow.
Subtraction.com: A Word About Unsolicited Redesigns
If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.
LevelDB: A Fast Persistent Key-Value Store – Google Open Source Blog
LevelDB is a fast key-value storage engine written at Google that provides an ordered mapping from string keys to string values. We are pleased to announce that we are open sourcing LevelDB under a BSD-style license.
The debt ceiling backlash within the GOP – War Room – Salon.com
Obama’s and Bush’s effects on the deficit in one graph – Ezra Klein – The Washington Post
Free Time – Marc-André Cournoyer’s blog
Yeah, life is hard, I agree with that.
Intellectual Ventures And The War Over Software Patents : Planet Money : NPR
If you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. Coda Hale of Yammer talks about service-level performance metrics, how they use them to guide their development strategy, and how you can improve the transparency of your own software.
codegram/rack-webconsole – GitHub
Rack-based interactive console (à la Rails console) for your web application’s front-end
Safari plugin to add Chrome like omnibar in Safari
Terminus is an experimental Capybara driver implemented in client-side JavaScript. It lets you script your application in any browser on any device, without needing browser plugins.
Blog II – The Sequel Blog – Dangerous Reflection
Bottom line: don’t call ruby’s reflection methods with user-defined strings or you open yourself up to denial of service.
Slicehost—a scrappy web company bootstrapped with $20,000—cashed out for big bucks in 2008. How did they do it? More importantly, was it worth it?
Today we’re happy to announce KIF, the “Keep It Functional” framework. KIF allows for realistic iOS integration testing through simulated user interaction.
Rails migrations with no downtime
Faraday: advanced HTTP requests made easy
Faraday is a library for making HTTP requests and to serve as a backbone for writing API wrapper libraries such as twitter. It has an interesting philosophy, but to really appreciate it you must first understand what problem it solves.
Today marks a very special occasion in the history of Heroku, as we are honored to announce that Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, has joined the Heroku team as Chief Architect, Ruby.
HTTP Scoop 1.4. The HTTP sniffer for Mac OS X.
Throw, Catch, Raise, Rescue… I’m so confused!
Ruby is a language that tries to anticipate your needs as a programmer. One common need is a way to terminate execution early when we find there is no further work to be done. Unlike in some languages, where we would have to either abuse the exception mechanism or use multiple loop breaks and method returns to achieve the same effect, Ruby provides us with the catch and throw mechanism to quickly and cleanly make an early escape. This leaves begin/raise/rescue free to be used for errors, and nothing else.
Format dates and times based on human-friendly examples, not arcane strftime directives.
Experimental fork of Pieter’s nice git GUI for OS X. Includes: sidebar, fetch, pull, push, add remote, merge, cherry-pick, rebase, clone, clone to. Mac OS X 10.5+ (see wiki for screenshot)
Scaling a web site using HTTP caching and JS async calls | Merbist
The challenge is that a lot of people using the Rails framework are used to doing page caching instead of relying on HTTP caching, even though this feature was added a long time ago. The major problem with page caching is that it doesn’t scale that well as soon as you run more than one server. Indeed you would need to store the page content to a shared drive between your servers or use memcached and do some work to avoid hitting your app every single time. On the other hand, HTTP caching is extremely easy to handle at the application level and it will dramatically reduce the amount of requests hitting your app. Let me explain a little more about HTTP caching.
framework-agnostic styled alert system for javascript
Courtesy Suicide » Matt Legend Gemmell
Excessive verbiage isn’t courtesy; it’s just waffling. Get to the bloody point.
Dynamic nested forms using jQuery made easy; works with formtastic, simple_form or default forms
Links!
Why WSJ Mobile App Gets ** Customer Reviews (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Why do so many people think they have to pay when they don’t? Because of a highly confusing user interface design.
Dynamic nested forms using jQuery made easy; works with formtastic, simple_form or default forms
Please, please, please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder. – humbledMBA
You don’t find a technical cofounder, you earn one.
Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.
Chatbox – Project collaboration inside Dropbox
Chatbox makes it easy to discuss or comment on files shared over Dropbox. Install it, right click on any files / folders inside Dropbox, and start conversations with people you shared the Dropbox folder with.
How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack
Redis is different than other database solutions in many ways: it uses memory as main storage support and disk only for persistence, the data model is pretty unique, it is single threaded and so forth. I think that another big difference is that in order to take advantage of Redis in your production environment you don’t need to switch to Redis. You can just use it in order to do new things that were not possible before, or in order to fix old problems.
Bundler for non-ruby dependencies from homebrew
Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads).
We use this library at GitHub to detect blob languages, highlight code, ignore binary files, suppress generated files in diffs and generate language breakdown graphs.
Native style momentum scrolling to arrive in iOS 5 · Johan Brook
The Technium: The Shirky Principle
The Billy Baldwin of Conditional Assignment // Collective Idea
Speed up your unit tests with Devise
Start-Up Lytro Aims to Sharpen Focus of Entire Camera Industry – Ina Fried – News – AllThingsD
BundleWatcher: Watching Your Gems
Heroku | The New Heroku (Part 1 of 4): The Process Model & Procfile
Egregious Dropbox Authentication Bug Yesterday
Mocking fog When Using It With Carrierwave
has_many :through – Slightly more readable Ruby
Automate Github Pull Requests [splitbrain.org]
Catastrophic Prototyping and Other Stories
I went to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and read some Chris Crawford. I learned that he had the same problem. But he didn’t think of it as failure. For him, this was an organic part of the development process. The failures filling his hard drive were actually “prototypes” that helped him decide which ideas were worth pursuing. For each good idea, there were a large number of stupid ones that didn’t work out. Failing, for this successful designer, was a way to find the good ideas.
? Most common numeric passcodes
What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails? « Katz Got Your Tongue?
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories
How we got the unusual symbol used for the menu command key
Automated Heroku Database Backups to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, or Google Storage – Jack Chu
The heroku_cloud_backup gem also adds a rake task to your project, but supports all the providers that fog supports. It’s also a lot more configurable through the heroku config. The heroku:cloud_backup task, when called, will upload the latest PG Backup capture to the cloud using fog. Currently, it supports Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, and Google Storage.
iOS device and OS version stats from Instapaper 3.0 – Marco.org
Use concerns to keep your models manageable — Gist
The Most Important Code Isn’t Code
Documentation is the single most important change I’ve made to my coding style in the last year.
Jeff Bezos on innovation: Amazon ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time’ – GeekWire
If it’s still Amazon’s philosophy to make bold bets, I would expect that maybe some of them wouldn’t work out, but I am just not seeing that. So, my question is where are the losers?
futuresimple/broadcast – GitHub
A broadcasting microframework making publishing of messages to different services easy.
Introducing appointment slots in Google Calendar – Official Gmail Blog
Reaching localhost from VMware / virtual machines on a Mac – Rowlando’s Blog
Jeff Dean’s Ruby Blog – Testing your gem against multiple rubies and rails versions with RVM
josh/ruby-coffee-script – GitHub
Ruby CoffeeScript Compiler
Ruby Eco Compiler
Chax is a collection of minor modifications and additions that make using Apple’s iChat more enjoyable.
halostatue/rubypython – GitHub
RubyPython is a bridge between the Ruby and Python interpreters. It embeds a running Python interpreter in the Ruby application’s process using FFI and provides a means for wrapping, converting, and calling Python objects and methods.
Learn how RubyGems works, and how to make your own.
Ryan’s Scraps: Extend Your ActiveRecord Association Methods
You can customize to your heart’s content – these are just some simplistic examples of how to plug into this nifty feature. I just recently stumbled upon it and thought it might be worth spreading the word since I found myself smitten by it.
mynu – A simple DSL to create a systembar menu with macruby in OSX
Divide and Concur « Code as Craft
You’d have a dyno that should (in terms of memory) be able to spin up 3 or 4 instances, but you were only able to spin up a single Thin instance per dyno. With Thin, even after the introduction of Cedar, this is still the case. But now since the application server constraint no longer exists, you can use Unicorn to do it. With this, you should be able to improve your application’s throughput by a factor of 3 to 4 on the same dyno.
A QuickLook plugin that lets you view plain text files without a file extension
This Blog Post Costs $3.99 : Planet Money : NPR
When something costs $3.99, you just round up and tell yourself it costs $4.00. Right?
Agile eLearning » Industrial Logic’s Greatest Hits » 2011 BLogic: Return of the Horizontal Slice
We can deliver value and learn faster by horizontally slicing our vertical slices and deploying those horizontal slices to production.
Buddhists make rational economic decisions | Diamond Way Buddhism UK Blog
Google Chrome – Why I Hate It And Continue To Use It
JavaScript Rails internationalization
danwebb.net – Its About The Hashbangs
Commit f4897f890d8dd33215fef238902988e8823a6539 to jnicklas/capybara – GitHub
Capybara ate Steak, didn’t it?
Highlight.js highlights syntax in code examples on blogs, forums and in fact on any web pages. It’s very easy to use because it works automatically: finds blocks of code, detects a language, highlights it.
moocode – cloud infrastructure and services
“Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It – Fog Creek Blog
We build stunningly distinct machines designed for city riding.
How I’ve started to contribute to open source – Binary Balance
The rest of this post is devoted to a couple of small case studies in my open source contributions and the lessons that I have drawn from them, hopefully for the benefit of those of us who may be interested in beginning to contribute to OSS.
Creating strongly-typed, app-wide, user-editable settings
rake deploy and rake cache_assets for Heroku (storing JS minimized and gzipped on Amazon S3) — Gist
rake deploy and rake cache_assets for Heroku (storing JS minimized and gzipped on Amazon S3)
Sinatra-based CMS
Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads. No coding required.
Fetch.io | Cloud Storage & Media, supports RapidShare, MegaUpload, MediaFire, BitTorrent, and more
FETCH.IO LETS YOU DOWNLOAD MEDIA FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES AND STREAM THEM INSTANTLY, FAST.
contrast/uploadify-s3 – GitHub
A rails plugin for using uploadify direct to S3
Amazon Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Print Books
elabs/front_end_testing_talk – GitHub
Our presentation “The Front End Testing Frontier” given by cjkihlbom and jnicklas at Scottish Ruby Conference 2011.
Perl, the first postmodern computer language – Perl.com
Netflix passes BitTorrent in U.S. bandwidth traffic
New Relic Releases Real User Monitoring and Ditches RPM Name
yostudios/Spritemapper – GitHub
CSS Spritemap Generator
DHH’s RailsConf 2011 Keynote Live-Blogged Here
Sinatra: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I automatically escape html?
I made a little Sinatra app called ghissues. It’s a dashboard view of all issues in private repos in your organizations on GitHub.
Because GitHub gives you:
https://github.com/organizations/ORG_NAME/dashboard/pulls
…but not:
https://github.com/organizations/ORG_NAME/dashboard/issues
You can use it here:
You can view the source and contribute here:
BTW — I started working at 37signals in April. They’re still looking for another programmer…!
Lots of links. It’s been too long!
Legacy Development with Pow « Stuff… And Things…
However, there is a downside: Pow doesn’t play nicely with Apache (or any server listening on port 80). Life isn’t all greenfield, if in the course of the day you need to work on PHP or CGI legacy apps Pow is not so simple. Pow creates a firewall rule that redirects port 80 to its port; to access Apache you need to either toggle the firewall rule on and off or move Apache to a different port all together. And now you’re running two web servers. There has to be a better way.
Experimental Terminal platform built on WebKit + node.js. Currently only for Mac, though the prototype works 90% in any WebKit browser.
Guard is a command line tool to easily handle events on files modifications (FSEvent / Inotify / Polling support).
Download github issues for offline access
Terminitor automates your development workflow setup. Less time setting up, more time getting things done.
Getting Organized with the Tasks API – Google Apps Developer Blog
Mailgun: Programmable Email Servers and Mailbox API
Send, track and analyze. Receive, parse and store.
Rails 3: Fully Loaded | Intridea Blog
I’d like to share a stack of gems that I’ve been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.
Exit Interview: Newsvine’s Mike Davidson – (37signals)
Heroku: How does Heroku work? – Quora
Obtiva’s Newest Senior Consultants
Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion for Groupon? – BusinessWeek
Sass on Heroku or any generated files for that matter – UnderpantsGnome
Since Heroku doesn’t care what you push to it as long as it is in the master branch on their end, why not generate the assets in a throwaway branch and push that up?
johnmuhl/html5.tmbundle – GitHub
HTML bundle for TextMate
Just How Dangerous Is Sitting All Day? [INFOGRAPHIC]
Applying the Unix Process Model to Web Apps
The unix process model is a powerful way to approach running your web app. Procfile gives us a way to declare process types, and Foreman gives us an easy way to run the app’s processes in both development and deployment environments.
Organized Models (Episode #173 – May 6th, 2011)
The Changelogs for Rails 3.1 Beta 1 — Gist
Queue failed Solr calls with Delayed::Job – UnderpantsGnome
rubygems 1.8 is coming – Polishing Ruby
Musings from Boulder – Waiting for jQuery Ajax calls to finish in Cucumber
martinbtt/net-http-spy – GitHub
Ever wondered what HTTP requests the Ruby gem you are using to connect to a third party API is making? Use HTTP Spy to see what is going on behind the scenes
VideoJS is an HTML5 video player that uses the HTML5 video tag built into modern browsers, and uses javascript to add custom controls, new functionality, and to fix cross browser bugs.
tenderlove/rails_autolink – GitHub
This is an extraction of the `auto_link` method from rails. The `auto_link` method was removed from Rails in version Rails 3.1. This gem is meant to bridge the gap for people migrating.
Fixing Uninitialized Constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes Error on Snow Leopard
Simple Ruby wrapper for the GitHub v2 API and feeds
Easily use any Plain Old Ruby Object as the model for Rails form helpers.
The “book” is dead [dive into mark]
What Safari’s “Reading List” in Lion means for Instapaper – Marco.org
Starbucks practices extremely predatory site selection for their stores: they’ll intentionally move in right across the street from or immediately next door to independent coffee shops, in an unnecessarily aggressive effort to drive them all out of business. It puts the bad ones out of business, but it actually helps the good ones.
The Netflix Tech Blog: Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage
Real time vs. slow time – and a defense of sane work hours – (37signals)
Subtle Patterns | High quality patterns for your next web project
Netflix tops Comcast as largest video subscription service – Apr. 25, 2011
Netflix knocked over a new milestone Monday: It now has more subscribers than the largest cable TV operator in the U.S.
MongoDB as a Key-Value Solution for Logging Events Data | Engine Yard Ruby on Rails Blog
Tech Notes: Complexity is the enemy
Another word for this problem is cleverness: to quote another one of the C hackers, “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
CodeConf Sunday Summary – The Changelog – Open Source moves fast. Keep up.
CodeConf Saturday Summary – The Changelog – Open Source moves fast. Keep up.
Option gathering made easy
Edge Rails.info :: ActiveRecord Identity Map
If you’ve been using rails for a while now you may be familiar with Active Record’s query cache. The query cache is a powerful part of Active Record which reduces unnecessary SQL calls and provides general speed improvements, especially when dealing with associations. The problem with the query cache, however, is when retrieving two identical records from the database two in-memory objects will still be created.
The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR
The easiest way to share localhost over the web.
How to Play with Rails 3.1, CoffeeScript and All That Jazz Right Now
Maybe I’m weird (actually, there’s no maybe about it) but when I first heard about Rails 3.1 getting CoffeeScript and Sass out of the box, I wanted to see how it worked and how smooth the process would be. So like quite a few people on IRC I’ve seen, I installed edge Rails (currently 3.1.0-beta) and got playing. (Yes, it’s PRE-RELEASE. Expect mischief!)
Subtraction.com: Commented Out
Rails 3.1 Adopts CoffeeScript, jQuery, Sass and.. Controversy
I’m glad David’s stepping into these sorts of discussions again. He seemed to fade away during the year before Rails 3 came out, leaving a lot of the “thought leadership” to Yehuda Katz. Now he’s back on top form and talking sense – long may it last.
The Quest Continues: Introducing capybara-webkit – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS
What we need was a real rendering engine coupled with a full Javascript and DOM implementation, but without all the cruft of a GUI browser. What we really wanted was a headless implementation of WebKit’s rendering engine that could be driven by Capybara tests. After Tristan “Websockets” Dunn showed me PhantomJs, I realized this might be possible using Qt’s WebKit implementation.
HireFire automatically “hires” and “fires” (aka “scales”) Delayed Job (and soon Resque too!) workers on Heroku. When there are no queue jobs, HireFire will fire (shut down) all workers. If there are queued jobs, then it’ll hire (spin up) workers. The amount of workers that get hired depends on the amount of queued jobs (the ratio can be configured by you). HireFire is great for both high, mid and low traffic applications. It can save you a lot of money by only hiring workers when there are pending jobs, and then firing them again once all the jobs have been processed. It’s also capable to dramatically reducing processing time by automatically hiring more workers when the queue size increases.
Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.
Over the past 8 years, we’ve used many tools for project communication and planning and we tried very hard to not write our own. The latest combination was Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker. Basecamp was great for discussion and communication. Pivotal Tracker was great for user stories and emergent planning.
However, we’ve grown tired of having one tool that designers love, one tool that developers love, and no tool that clients love.
Syntactic suger for http://pow.cx/
Issues 2.0: The Next Generation – GitHub
Facebook’s Open Compute Project
Better AWS Access Control with IAM (and Fog)
Any MacRuby Apps in the App Store? Yes. – RedwoodApp Development Blog
jashkenas/coffee-script-tmbundle – GitHub
A TextMate Bundle for CoffeeScript
Most followed users on github by city.
Node powered Rack server
Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X
The Git TextMate Bundle
Bookmarks Bar Keyboard Shortcuts – Google Chrome extension gallery
Trigger the first ten Bookmarks Bar items with Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+0 (on OS X; it’s Alt on Windows, Meta on Linux).
Call Me Fishmeal.: Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Heroku | Dev Center | Managing Multiple Environments for an App
Eco lets you embed CoffeeScript logic in your markup. It’s like EJS and ERB, but with CoffeeScript inside the . Use it from Node.js to render your application’s views.
8 Ways Companies Can Contribute to Open Source Communities
Permit (freely encourage) your developers to engage with the OSS community around each project. They, and your company, will get two primary benefits: You will gain a more intimate understanding of the projects, and you will have social and productive relationships with the other core developers and contributors in the community. It’s easy to ask a friend to help solve a problem. The first step is to contribute to their project; friendship and partnership will follow.
cbeier/heroku_asset_packager – GitHub
A plugin to duck-punch asset packager and provide middleware to work on Heroku with a ROFS.
Testing Advice in Eleven Steps « Rails Test Prescriptions Blog
As it happens, my generic advice on Rails testing hasn’t changed substantially, even though the tools I use on a daily basis have.
Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1—the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1’s will then start appearing in Google’s search results.
Thoughts on testing – part 1 – Object Reload
It doesn’t take a genius to realise that testing is a very personal matter. From Test::Unit purists to RSpec evangelists, everyone has their own take on testing Ruby code. And whilst we believe that not only there are no silver bullets in most of the problems in software development but personal preferences make it unlikely that there will ever be any, we’d like to share our thoughts about testing in this series of posts. We hope it will be as enjoyable for you to read as it was for us to write.
Website Monitoring and Load Testing – In The Cloud | BrowserMob
BrowserMob Provides FREE Website Monitoring and Load Testing [Used by github]
JSONView for Chrome™ – Google Chrome extension gallery
JSONView for chrome is an extension that helps you to parse and view JSON documents
jamesgolick/always_verify_ssl_certificates – GitHub
Ruby’s net/http is setup to never verify SSL certificates by default. Most ruby libraries do the same. That means that you’re not verifying the identity of the server you’re communicating with and are therefore exposed to man in the middle attacks. This gem monkey-patches net/http to force certificate verification and make turning it off impossible.
bcardarella/client_side_validations – GitHub
Rails 3 Client Side Validations
citizen428/methodfinder – GitHub
A Smalltalk-like Method Finder for Ruby. Provided with a receiver, a desired result and possibly some arguments, it will list all methods that produce the result when called on the receiver with the arguments.
an add-on library that implements several middleware (such as JSON and XML parsers) and helps you build an awesome stack that covers most of your API-consuming needs.
Commit cb3e96a447df592947ae10221c7494eb8bf08012 to rails/rails – GitHub
Make JavaScriptHelper#j() an alias for JavaScriptHelper#escape_javascript()
A new look and feel for Test::Unit output — Test::Unit Reporter (New)
Commit f8a05ad297d637596d029b013bb65128ca0aa8bd to rails/rails – GitHub
Allow FormHelper#form_for to specify the :method as a direct option instead of through the :html hash
Commit 2c0c4d754e34b13379dfc53121a970c25fab5dae to rails/rails – GitHub
Add `config.force_ssl` configuration which will load `Rack::SSL` middleware if set to true
Commit e2b07ee000439d0bd41f725ff9f7ad53e52a7e9b to rails/rails – GitHub
Added Base.http_basic_authenticate_with to do simple http basic authentication with a single class method call
TomK32/macruby-statusmenu – GitHub
An example for a StatusMenu application written in MacRuby
Adding additional processing support to CarrierWave » Transcending Frontiers
Out of the box CarrierWave provides a consistent interface to process images using RMagick, MiniMagick or ImageScience. Resizing and cropping is supported for all three image processing engines but setting the quality or removing personal data is not supported. Thankfully, CarrierWave provides an easy way to extend the default functionality so we can do more.
Rails 3 + Devise + Uploadify = No Flash Session Hacks
So, this token authentication got me thinking. Instead of sending an encoded string with session information to flash, which in turn sends it to the server, which in turn hacks it into an actual session, I could just send the user’s authentication token along! No sever-side hacks required – it’s all built in into devise already!
Job: Rails Programmer – 37signals
Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances
Skills Matter : CukeUp! 24-03-11
Product design at GitHub — Warpspire
Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Coudal
David Worthington’s Mom Reviews the iPad, Her First Computer
Mom: Yeah. I’m doing more and more of that lately. I’m learning from my mistakes, and beginning to use Google.
Ryan Singer at Future of Web Apps, London 2010 on Vimeo
Here’s a talk I gave at Future of Web Apps 2010 in London. In this talk, I walk through the steps of creating a web app including modeling, sketching, HTML, Photoshop explorations, and moving from static mockups to live running code. Each step is illustrated with a real example, including some live sketching and live HTML. I also wanted to give a sense of how we think about apps at 37signals, as a stack of different levels that we can iterate on individually.
Visualizing a product’s UI and code layers – (Ryan Singer)
If I ask you to visualize a software product, a picture of the interface probably comes to mind. From the user’s perspective, the interface is the product. For us on the development side, the product is more than that. It’s the interface, the code, the connections from code to UI, the separations of concerns and the boundaries between features.
Object-Hash Mapping for Redis
A ruby client library for the redis key value storage engine
Using Redis with Ruby on Rails
TL;DR: Redis is fucking awesome.
Why I Don’t Do Sales On The App Store « carpeaqua by Justin Williams
pushState + ajax = pjax. pjax loads HTML from your server into the current page without a full reload. It’s ajax with real permalinks, page titles, and a working back button that fully degrades.
An interactive online marketplace where you can learn to code directly in the browser
Monitor your service’s availability through a simple, clean DSL
A friendly wrapper for launchctl
Solr-powered search for Ruby objects
loopj/jquery-tokeninput – GitHub
Tokeninput is a jQuery plugin which allows your users to select multiple items from a predefined list, using autocompletion as they type to find each item. You may have seen a similar type of text entry when filling in the recipients field sending messages on facebook.
Bake, Don’t Fry (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)
inessential.com: A plea for baked weblogs
nathansmith/formalize – GitHub
Teach your forms some manners
Sign, edit, and fax documents online | HelloFax
With HelloFax, you can send faxes, sign documents and fill out forms… all from your computer.
Y Combinator on Tuesday showed off its latest class of start-ups at its Mountain View, CA, headquarters, offering an extra-large sampler pack of developer tools; social apps; lots of services for markets like real estate, doctors and parents; and, of course, a few of its trademark productivity apps.
We’ve been on a quest for years to make sure our integration tests covered the Javascript components of the app. We noted in November that we felt the community had reached an important plateau with a toolset of Cucumber, Capybara, and Akephalos.
While still frequently painful, our default mentality on new projects is “we will be able to test the Javascript components of this app in our usual integration tests.”
bernerdschaefer/akephalos – GitHub
Headless HTMLUnit powered browser for Capybara
Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (aka The New York Times Is Delusional)
The New York Times pricing seems designed not to get people to subscribe digitally, but rather to discourage existing subscribers from cancelling their print subscriptions. I think the chart above validates that view: they apparently have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars.
devstructure/blueprint – GitHub
Reverse engineer server configuration
Newspaper Club | Helping people to make their own newspapers
We’re here to help you make your own newspapers. You can use our online tool to upload and arrange your words and pictures or you can use the site to send us a PDF. We print every Tuesday afternoon, and you’ll get your papers in about a week.
Desktime – Shared Desks and Coworking
Rent shared spaces, empty desks, conference rooms, or entire offices by the day, week, or month.
Serve is a small Rack-based web server and rapid prototyping framework for Web applications (specifically Rails apps). It is designed to compliment web application development and enforce a strict separation of concerns between designer and developer. Using Serve allows the designer to work in a separate prototype project, while the developer can work on the actual application and utilize resources from the prototype as needed. This allows the designer to focus on presentation and flow, while the developer can focus on implementation.
Building a business around maximizing your individual happiness is not particularly useful or admirable. That is my position, and I’m well aware that it may be unpopular with some.
ketralnis comments on Why reddit was down for 6 of the last 24 hours.
I don’t work for reddit anymore (as of about a week ago, although I didn’t get as much fanfare as raldi did), but I can tell you that they’re giving Amazon too much credit here. Amazon’s EBSs are a barrel of laughs in terms of performance and reliability and are a constant (and the single largest) source of failure across reddit.
Lessons from 11 years of community (my SXSW 2011 talk) on Vimeo
A lot of people missed my talk so I recorded it in my office as soon as I got home from Austin. It covers mainly moderation tips and ideas for building tools for more effective moderation.
Generate memes from http://memegenerator.net
the { buckblogs :here }: Infinity
Clarifying the Roles of the .gemspec and Gemfile « Katz Got Your Tongue?
