Articles

Rock the Job Episode 3: Become a Celebrity [Video]

In episode 3 of Rock the Job, Nick and Rob talk about how to turn yourself into a celebrity.

Scrum’d Server Move and Database Restore

We had planned to move scrum’d last night to a new host, however, during the move something happened with the database server and we had to perform a restore of the last backup. Everything should be in place as the backup that was restored was from 15 minutes before we began the server move.

Double Shot #475

Just a couple of odds and ends.

Minor Changes to the Rails Security Policy

After reviewing the feedback on the two recent security announcements we’ve made a few minor changes to the Ruby on Rails security policy.

Hoe 2, Electric Boogaloo

What is Hoe?

Hoe is a library that provides extensions to rake to automate every step of the development process from genesis to release. It provides project creation, configuration, and a multitude of tasks including project maintenance, testing, analysis, and release. We found rake to be an incredible vehicle for functionality in the abstract, but decidedly lacking in concrete functionality. We filled in all the blanks we could through a "hoe-spec":

Yeni Başlayanlara Pratik Bilgiler - Translation to Turkish

Yeni Başlayanlara Pratik Bilgiler

Bu Zamana Kadar Web Geliştirme İle İlgili Öğrendiğiniz Herşeyi Unutun

Rails bir .NET veya PHP değildir ve onların metodolojilerini taklit etmeye çalışmaz.

MVC ve REST kuramsal yapılarını Rails uygulamanıza başlamadan önce öğrenirseniz, hem uygulamanızın kalitesi artacak hem de Rails öğrenmeniz hızlanacaktır.

GitHub Rebase #23

It’s Rebase time once again!

RubyGems: Problems and (proposed) Solutions

There’s been a fair bit of discussion around RubyGems lately, and some suggestions about what the core problems with RubyGems are.

People have the general sense that there’s something wrong with dependencies, and that it might have something to do with multiple versions being installed in one repository. It also seems (to people) that having require do magical things is Bad(tm). And in general, people like knowing exactly what versions of things are being loaded.

Unsavory updates

After reading Scripting Java Libraries With Ruby on the Engine Yard

Getting Started With JRuby

Last week, Engine Yard announced they would soon support running JRuby in their cloud environment. I think I speak for the whole JRuby community when I say how excited we are about this new possibility. JRuby has proven itself a top-notch, production-quality Ruby implementation, and the Engine Yard announcement really made us feel proud of what we've accomplished.

Ruby En Rails 2009 Recap | Rails Fire

Ruby En Rails 2009 Recap

The last past days in Amsterdam for Ruby En Rails 2009 were really great.

I arrived on Thursday and had the chance to discuss a possible security vulnerability in Rails I discovered a while back with Yehuda and Mislav during lunch.

Afterwards we went to the conference dinner and met many very nice people and had a long discussion about voting systems, European vs. American culture, gun laws, and political systems.

Friday was the first conference day and started for us with being 40 minutes late as we headed up to the wrong metro station. Yehuda was supposed to give a keynote as the first session... luckily the organizers swapped the sessions. So unfortunately we missed the first session but were in time for Yehuda to give his keynote.

Yehuda talked about the Rails/Merb merge and dissected what was achieved. It was a very good, in-depth presentation about the new features of Rails 3 and what left to do. I really liked the new router DSL, actions being Rack-apps, and the death of Rails Metal (the new, slicker possibility to build simpler/smaller controllers takes care of this.).

After the coffee break I gave my Rails Security presentation about common attacks against web applications and how you can protect against them in Rails. Usually this is quite heavy stuff and people tend to sit quiet and listen as this is new to most. In Amsterdam I had some very good questions and discussions on session fixation, JavaScript high-jacking, and app reconnaissance.

Then we listened to Julio Javier Cicchelli talk about Rubyists.EU, an effort to make the different European Rails communities easier to find and build a common European community.

We went to lunch with James which gave us some time to catch up. Took us a while to find a decent place around the conference hall but we managed to find a restaurant where we tried to estimate the global financial burden due to Internet Explorer and what will happen to Microsoft if they were charged for the extra work needed done.

After lunch Eloy educated us about the current state of MacRuby. I'm really looking forward to spending some time hacking Mac apps in Ruby.

The next session gave an overview about monitoring, performance, and the different tools like request-log-analyzer or Nagios.

The conference was closed by Jeremy giving a keynote about Rails, Ruby, and the current state of things in the community (and a sneak-peak at ActiveRelation and what it will be able to do). It was very well received and a good closing session.

Afterwards a big group headed for dinner. We ended up in a small, very local restaurant. It included very nice food, good discussions with new friends from Finnland, and a waiter/owner who runs the restaurant homepage with Rails and asked Yehuda for help :-)

The next day was titled Geek Day and included many lightning talks (that ended up being nearly full sessions and had very good content). Parallel to the great sessions about MongoDB, DataMapper, or experience reports there was a Rails Rumble featuring five teams going on.

The most notable session of the second day was Justin Halsall, dressed for Halloween, talking about BlockHelpers and view DSLs. It was a hilarious show.

The Rumble was a great idea. In contrast to the usual Rumble the teams got a specific challenge. They should build something that improves the situation with Rails dependencies and out-of-date gems laying around in vendor/gems. The winning team would get two tickets to RailsConf 2010.

One team extended builder to list outdated gems and got their changes even merged back to builder by Yehuda on the same day. Another team extended Webistrano to accept projects dependencies and display them on the stage page. Some teams build a command line tool to extract local dependencies like your gems or even the MySQL version and push those definitions to a central place. The winning team had the the most advanced idea regarding update notification and gem-sets for applications. I could really see something like this being integrated into gemcutter. Congratulations Ludo and Michel!

Ruby En Rails day two was celebrated with a big dinner and drinks. After a very nice evening we headed back to the hotel as everybody had an early flight out. Some were still discussing Rails, some were lucky to be able to enjoy Amsterdam longer.

I really enjoyed the conference and Amsterdam. Thank you Chris and Tim Obdam for organizing the whole event!