You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2007.
There’s plenty going on in the Rails community (and other corners of non-Microsoft software development). Here are a few more shiny things that have caught my eye lately.
- Rails performance tip - using YSlow - Worth a look if you need to speed up page load times.
- Mingle is live - ThoughtWorks has their agile project management tool ready to go.
- acts_as_taggable_on_steroids - A plugin that adds tag clouds and other goodies to the standard acts_as_taggable.
I fear I let things pile up a bit last week. Time to clear out some of these open browser windows and hope that the news isn’t too stale.
- A ‘DHH Approved’ Logo? - There’s been a fair amount of discussion the last week over the fact that DHH wants to keep the Rails logo locked down as far as book cover usage goes. While I understand the trademark law argument, there’s some clash with open source principles here. And handing out a copy of the logo in every generated Rails app may have already fatally weakened the protection anyhow - though IANAL.
- Editing Multiple Models in One Form - I needed UI to edit all the records in a model on one web form in Rails; this proved to be easy to set up once I knew how, and hard to figure out. This tutorial pointed me in the right direction.
- Apache Lucene - Query Parser Syntax - Since Solr builds on Lucene, trying to figure out how to write queries for acts_as_solr will eventually lead to this page.
- redMine - Rails Based Open Source Project Management Application - Review of another competitor to Trac/BaseCamp/et al. Looks worth digging into.
- OpenID Sample Application Updated - Ben Curtis has revved his OpenID reference app for Rails.
- GeoKit - Rails plugin for geocoding. I’m gonna need this soon.
The bookmarks have piled up a bit again. Time to clean them out to start the week.
- Capistrano 2.0 - The release of a significant new version. I guess I finally have to stop putting off learning about the new features and changes now.
- In-Place Editing: The Summer 2007 Rewrite - And speaking of new features, there’s been a significant bit of code thrash over at script.aculo.us.
- pure class - Discussion of the best way to define a user.reviews.good (or analogous) method, something that I need to do soon for the current app I’m working on.
Posting is going to be irregular for a while, I expect: here’s why
- pure class - I’m going to need to use one of these techniques for tracking down things through ActiveRecord extensions soon, I think.
- Twitter4R 0.2.0: Twitter API for Ruby - There are now two different Ruby libraries for accessing the Twitter API. Some people would say that is two too many.
- Connector and Slingshot Open-sourced and Free - The Joyent guys are giving away a big ol’ gob of code.
We’re trying to prep our house to put it on the market. This sucks down a great deal of time, and explains why posting may be spottier than usual for a little bit.
- How to Create Many to Many Relationships in Ruby on Rails - One of the basic skills, but it does point out creating the join table, which is easy to miss the first time you set up such a relationship. (via dzone)
- Haml 1.7 has been released! - Alternative markup language for Rails views. Lots of perf work in the last few releases, so it’s becoming a more viable alternative, at that.
- Using Omnigraffle to visualise Rails model associations - I could have used this about a week before I found it, since I spent a big chunk of that week drawing ERDs to understand a pile of existing Rails models. This one uses code to reflect over the models and build ERDs automatically.
- Warehouse Subversion Browser Released! - This is the SVN browser in Rails from the ActiveReload folks. Now available for a one-time $30 fee.
- Replacing Ant With Rake - Here’s how you can call all your ant tasks as if they were rake tasks, and so switch to rake for ongoing maintenance of your ant files.
A few random links for the Fourth of July.
- Information Card Ruby - Yes, you can now make InfoCard play with Rails, if you must. This will be a good thing for those trying to smuggle Rails into Microsoft shops.
- Mingle is Now Available - That would be the new agile project management tool from ThoughtWorks, now in an Early Access release.
- Comatose - Micro-CMS implemented as a Rails plugin, to handle editing of those few semi-static pages that pile up in every application.
Here I am, half a year into my experiment with cutting loose from Microsoft, and I think I can pronounce it a success:
- I now have two Rails consulting jobs running, and I’m as busy on that front as I want to be from now until about the end of August, which is about as far out as my consulting time has ever been assured. This doesn’t mean that I’m not looking for more, but it means that I’m feeling a comfortable cushion, and a confidence that I’ll find more work to keep the pipeline full. My Rails rate is nowhere near what my top C# rate was (or for that matter, what my top Netware rate was many years ago), but that’s OK.
- I’ve got a couple of leads on actual US-dollar paying Second Life work, which I am actively pursuing.
- I still don’t feel like I’ve reached the “expert” level with Rails yet, but at least I can get it to mostly do what I want with minimal fuss. The times when I go off the clock to research something are getting fewer and taking less time.
- My .NET skills are rapidly deteriorating; I haven’t written a line of C# or VB code in months.
- I’m moved almost entirely to the Mac for my day-to-day work, with the exception of maintaining the Larkware site.
