Articles

Data driven design

Great post from a google designer who left for twitter because he wanted to be in a less data driven env.

It seems like he felt that the Google environement was unable to make daring/basic design decisions due to its focus on data.

Here’s one quote:

“I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that.”

Encode URL parameters in JavaScript

Last week I had the fun of trying to fix what appeared to be random InvalidAuthenticityToken exceptions coming from a page using Ajax requests. I eventually tracked the problem down to this snippet of JavaScript (and in my defence I didn't write the code, honest!):

Belated april fools

Wycats correctly points out that this article on NHibernate would be seen as an april fools joke in the Ruby world.

Using Wikipedia and Ruby to make timelines

I’m taking several history-ish classes this quarter, so I’ve been thinking a lot about dates. It would be cool to compare dates and events from radically different histories.

Wikipedia has tons of history articles with dates everywhere. I spent a half hour today and wrote a quick app to compare when things happened in multiple wiki articles.

Stress/Benchmark Testing on rails with httperf

Want to do benchmark or stress testing on your rails applications? Then look @ httpref
What is httpref?
Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The focus of httperf is not on implementing one particular benchmark but on providing a [...]

Shorthand alternative for respond_to

If you have a simple respond_to block in your controller that looks like this:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.xml
end

You can use this alternate syntax and save a few keystrokes..

respond_to(:html, :xml)

Ok so it may not give you a huge performance boost, but if you’re obsessed with reducing the size of your code, this is a nice way to make a saving!

Rails 1.2.3 to Rails 2.3

As I mentioned last week, I am busy doing an upgrade of WhoDo.es from Rails 1.2.2 to Rails 2.3 and it is slowly sowly coming together, still have to do a lot of modifications for internationalization.

In my search for any help, I came across a very good step-by-step guide from Peter Marklund that might help someone if they might have a similar quest!

Hope it might be useful for someone else. Please follow the link here

Rails Template: Create a Twitter Application in Seconds

TwitterAuth has been out for a little while and has received some great feedback. Dr. Nic released a great template that lets you quickly build a TwitterAuth app for deployment to SliceHost and since I have some plans for a number of Twitter applications I wanted to try my own hand at writing one up.

If you have Rails 2.3, all you need to do is run this:

#315 | »Crack - The Easiest Way to Parse XML and JSON« in Category Advanced Knowledge/Digging Deeper

»Crack - The Easiest Way to Parse XML and JSON«

This Week in Edge Rails

March 28, 2009 – April 3, 2009

Things are still fairly quiet out on the edge: 5 commits this week. The work for Rails 3.0 hasn’t been merged back to the master branch yet, so if you need any of the post-2.3 patches you can still just update to edge without worrying about major upheaval.

Changes

conference | Rails Fire

conference

Rails Underground Recap

I finally had the time to write up a recap of Rails Underground in London, even though it’s a little overdue. I’ve really come to enjoy smaller regional conferences. Since it’s such a smaller crowd than larger conferences, you get to meet and spend more time with the same people—getting to know them better and pick each other’s brain. Rails Underground was great because of this reason, but not this reason alone.

Remaining Ruby & Rails Conferences in 09

The Ruby and Rails community is still growing strong and the sheer number of conferences coming up is proof of that. Below I’ve put together a list of all the conferences/events I could find before 2010 so you can hopefully make it out to at least one. ;-)

If you do attend one of these conferences, do me a favor and thank the organizer for taking the time to produce the event. Most of them spend a great deal of unpaid time making the event happen and most of them aren’t making a profit. Their passion and hard work helps keep our community strong.

The Rails Conference 2009

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RAILSCONF 2009

The Rails Conference 2009

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RAILSCONF 2009

Scotland On Rails Presentations Now Online: 27 Awesome Videos

Did you miss the Scotland on Rails conference this year? No need to fret though, as Engine Yard are hosting videos of all the presentations made at this popular conference.

Rails 3 API and Hadoop, Map Reduce, and Pig to be Presented

We’re extremely excited to announce two of the newest additions to our ever growing speaker list for Aloha on Rails. This conference is shaping up to be a true testament of the breadth and aloha of the Rails community.

Yehuda Katz, core committer and spearheading the Merb/Rails merger, will teach us the principles of the Rails 3 API. He will show us how to read and understand the Rails source code so we can customize the framework just the way we want. The public API for Rails 3 is a major development, and will help stabilize the plugin and extension ecosystem.

Railsconf 2009 in 34 Minutes

Here it is, Railsconf in 34 minutes. We’ve got some great speakers on video here including Charles Nutter, Ilya Grigorik, Jim Weirich, Matt Aimonetti, Michael Koziarski, Neal Ford, Obie Fernandez, Scott Chacon, Yehuda Katz, David Chelimsky, Aslak Hellesøy, Chris Wanstrath, and David Heinemeier Hansson .. amongst many others.

View Video on Viddler

Rubystein: Ruby meets Wolfenstein

At Railsconf 2009 the guys over at Phusion released Rubystein, a Wolfenstein clone written in Ruby. I managed to track down Ninh Bui to give us a video walk through, and the following video was played at Railsconf before the Wednesday Keynote.

View on Blip.tv

Get the source on Github, and play it yourself.

Railsconf 2009 – Wednesday

Finally, here’s the last video I put together for Railsconf, summarizing the event. I’ll be working on my speaker video and hopefully have that posted sometime next week.

View on Blip.tv

Thanks for Watching!

Railsconf 2009 – Tuesday

Here’s my video covering Tuesday at Railsconf 2009. This time around I asked people to tell me about a Gem, Plugin, or Library they’ve used in the past few months that saved them time.

View on Blip.tv

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