Articles

Improving Rails Applications performance

I have done some research about improving Rails Applications performance. I would feel the the following few points need to be considered when we optimize rails applications for performance:

1) Avoid the use of dynamic URL generation (link_to, url_for) since rails needs to look up the routes table and that may take time. Just hard code the controller name and the action.

2) Try to avoid the excess use of helpers since it adds overhead.

sharing your changes

Git’s distributed nature does not rely on central servers to host and broadcast your code. There’s more options available to you if for some reason your main server goes down, or perhaps when GitHub goes down.

alternative Block execution on empty Enumerable

i did not find an easy way to specify an alternative action when an iterator had nothing to iterate over.

My first try was

New Managed Hosting Plans

After months of research, planning and development, we’re proud to announce the Rails Machine Managed Hosting plans, starting at $275/month. You can now get direct access to the same team of engineers and developers who have brought you reliable hosting for your Rails applications since 2006.

bash git status

Yeah, we all know about the git status command but that’s just way too many characters to type again and again. Why bother with those 10 keyboard strokes when you could have your shell simply output git’s working state? Sounds awesome, right? Luckily a few hackers have thrown together some scripts to do just this in your bash prompt. If you have these or similiar scripts working in other shells, submit a tip about it!

Announcing Golden Gate Ruby Conference

This has been a long time coming, and I'm very happy to finally be able to announce the first ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference, here in San Francisco on April 17 and 18. There's so much interest in Ruby here in SF, and tons of Ruby mojo too, so it's about time we had our own conference! We'll be bringing in some great speakers from all over so locals who don't get to travel to conferences can get exposed to stuff they can't usually see. And we'll also have some of our high-powered local talent showing off their stuff too.

Announcing Golden Gate Ruby Conference

This has been a long time coming, and I'm very happy to finally be able to announce the first ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference, here in San Francisco on April 17 and 18. There's so much interest in Ruby here in SF, and tons of Ruby mojo too, so it's about time we had our own conference! We'll be bringing in some great speakers from all over so locals who don't get to travel to conferences can get exposed to stuff they can't usually see. And we'll also have some of our high-powered local talent showing off their stuff too.

Do You Test Your Views?

Those of you following me on twitter already know that I’m learning Cucumber.

Traditionally I don’t test my views or controllers all that much. I know, I know, it’s heresy. But I’ve just never gotten much value from writing Rails functional tests nor integration tests.

Let browsers cache static files to greatly speed up your site

There are many factors that determine how long a page takes to show up in a browser. When a page is requested by a browser, the server needs some time to compute the page contents (controller, model/database, view) and returns HTML to the browser.

tip for writing better web app copy

Bad copy is hard to detect, but it makes a big difference in the clarity of an interface or the success of a sell.

Most of the copy in my apps is written once, found sufficient, then ignored. The hard part comes when I decide to rewrite. Since I can’t unit test writing, the options of different verbs or phrases to type gets overwhelming.

Jason Fried wrote an article yesterday on this w/r/t writing copy for highrise that I want to elaborate on.

He says:

Startup School 2009 | Rails Fire

Startup School 2009

This day I had the pleasure to attend the 2009 edition of Y-Combinator’s Startup School 2009 helded at Berkley university, California. When I read the schedule of the event I stood impressed by the names of the speakers in particular I was curious to hear Mark Zuckerberg , the creator of Facebook, and Jason Fried, from 37 Signals. The event begun with a very entertaning presentation from Paul Graham focused on determing what are the key factors of a successful startup and, more generally, what really means be a startup founder. Then it was the turn of Greg McAdoo from Sequoia Capital who gave us advices on how and when a startup need to do fund-raising.



Jason Fried tryed in his speech to demiystify some of the common sentences related to a startup business; in his opinion you don’t need to search an initial investment to start a company; that’s because if you begun with money your first thought are on how spend it (employees, fornitures, ...); but if you don’t have money you focus only on how to make money.



Next went Evan Williams and Biz Stone, founders of twitter; their interview was full of funny anecdotes and tips; one over all: In the beginning of Twitter someone said ‘twitter is fun but it’s not useful’. Ev dryly remarked: ‘so is ice cream’.



After lunch the conference continued with an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and ended up with a party helded within the Y combinator offices !