Caffeine Driven Development

Running a website costs money which is why I’ve added some slots for Google AdSense ads on this blog and in its feed, namely at the bottom of every blog post, near the top of the sidebar on every page, and at the bottom of each feed item. They’re fairly small and colored similarly to the rest of the blog to make them as discrete as possible. Thanks for your understanding!

• Tilt, “Generic interface to multiple Ruby template engines”
• Frank, “Frank lets you build static sites using your favorite libs, painlessly”
• Rails 3: Let ActiveRecord Manage Your Translations
• Testing Facebook
• Jasmine for JavaScript Testing: It’s Screw.Unit++
• Put your mailer where the action is!, no, by “action” he does not necessarily mean controller action
• Ambitious Query Indexer, “Pain-free indexing to speed up your Rails app”
• Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby
• BlueGreenDeployment, clever
• Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie
• validates_timeliness, “Date and time validation plugin for Rails 2.x and allows custom date/time formats”
• Breakneck, simple gem for serving static files on your development machine
• Performance Tuning for Phusion Passenger
• A quick RVM rundown
• 47 Amazing CSS3 Animation Demos
• SEOChecker, “check your website if it is seo”
• Jasmine, “DOM-less simple JavaScript testing framework” from Pivotal Labs
• The Ruby Standard Wiki, online version of the Ruby ISO standard draft
• #gemsday, “Share your favorite new RubyGems weekly”
• Rubex, “A simple copy cat of Rubular” – the real version has supposedly been acting up lately
• Write Fewer Regular Expressions, yay
• lambda { foo }.should run_in(1.second), useful RSpec matcher from Ryan Bigg

• Exploring Rails 3, a free two-hour online conference featuring Yehuda Katz, Gregg Pollack, Jeremy Kemper, and Ryan Tomayko
• Find all online users with Authlogic
• validates :rails_3, :awesome => true
• Bundler 0.9: Heading Toward 1.0
• SafeBuffers and Rails 3.0
• Express, “Sinatra-like JavaScript node.js web development framework — insanely fast, insanely sexy”
• Chartbeat, “gives you real-time analytics so that you know what’s happening when it’s happening”
• Why Arel?
• Unobtrusive JS In Rails 3 With Prototype, I think it’s the first time I see the words “unobtrusive” and “Prototype” in the same sentence
• Shoebox, “helps you manage styles and scripts as first-class citizens in Rails”
• wizardly, “create a functioning wizard for any model in three steps”
• Gemcutter January 2010 Changelog, a few nice feature additions

• Babushka, test-driven deployment
• Just In Time, Not Just In Case, words of wisdom
• Essential Rails Extras
• iPhone Style Checkboxes, “Turn your checkboxes into iPhone-style binary switches”
• There is no magic, there is only awesome (Part 4)
• The Ruby Show, a relaunch of the Rails Envy podcast
• The Path to Rails 3: Approaching the upgrade
• New ActionMailer API in Rails 3.0
• The Mysterious Pseudo Class in CSS
• Dirty Associations, “allows you to track changes made to your model’s associations”
• Correct, Beautiful, Fast (In That Order), interesting

• Optimizing HTML
• Rails + MongoDB resources
• url_store, “Data securely stored in urls”
• Simple Mustache JSON Serialization
• Rails and Merb Merge: Rails Core
• A Review on the Rails 3 BugMash
• Multiple Domain Page Caching
• Active Record Query Interface 3.0, a must-read!
• fusebox: A safer way to monkey-patch JavaScript?
• AutoSprite, “An easy, automated CSS image sprite creator”
• Notes from the field upgrading to Rails 3

• Closing in on Last Call for the Beta, of Rails 3 that is
• Why Mocra Is Awesome
• CSS3 pseudo selector emulation for Internet Explorer 5-8
• A successful Git branching model
• Rails Quick Tip: Readable Conditional Validation
• Scaffolds != Rails
• JavaScript as a teaching tool: Learn classic computer science approaches using a language you probably already know
• Explore GitHub, yet another way to waste time on GitHub
• Jaml, “beautiful HTML generation for JavaScript”

And another blog post that links to my BugMash articles:

• Rails 3 Reading Material

Thanks Maxim Chernyak! (Aka hakunin)

• Render Options in Rails 3
• Jubilator, an “attempt to make the GitHub repository browsing experience better”
• Ruby Call Center, funny video featuring one of Envy Lab’s client jobs
• Paperboy, “A node.js module for delivering static files”
• The Demise of CSS: Why Sass And Languages Like It Will Triumph
• AridCache, “Automates efficient caching of your ActiveRecord collections”
• Hammertime, “An interactive error console for Ruby”
• Let your SQL Growl in Rails 3
• Navvy, “Simple Ruby background job processor”

The blog posts that link to one of or both of my BugMash articles:

• Rails Bugmash an exciting first experience
• Discovering Rails 3 generators
• Rails Bugmash 2010

These and the people that shared my articles on Twitter has generated a lot of traffic on my blog an won me a few more subscribers as well. Thanks!

• Ruby script for setting up a Rails Edge (3.0.pre) application
• Powerful Color Manipulation with Sass
• Introducing RCapture, “a Ruby library that allows placing hooks on methods using a convenient interface”
• Ruby Net::HTTP cheat sheet, “A collection of Ruby Net::HTTP examples”
• Rspec 2 and Rails 3
• Find By Hash, “Extension to ActiveRecord to allow you to do findy-thingies with hashes”
• fixwidth, “Bookmarklet, wrapping in a 600px centered div. Improves readability on 100% width pages”
• Improved Commit Diffs on GitHub. Absolutely awesome
• How to keep your Vim Plugins up to date
• NXdom, “Short domain name search”
• TipTip, tooltip jQuery plugin

A bit late today, but here you go:

• serialized_attributes, “brings some document-oriented behavior into ActiveRecord”
• Understanding M17n, on character encodings in Ruby 1.9
• Secure Passwords sans SSL
• Validation Scopes, “Create independent sets of validations with the full power of ActiveRecord’s validation macros”
• Weary, “A little DSL for consuming RESTful web services”
• Jekyll on Heroku
• Pimp your $PS1 with source control information
• Importing Legacy Data in Rails
• ResqueMailer, “Rails plugin for sending asynchronous email with ActionMailer and Resque”
• Roll your own pagination links with will_paginate
• The Next BugMash event – January 16th-17th, 2010, mark your calenders for this alternative BugMash event!

I’m reading The C Book at the moment. It’s shockingly fast compared to Ruby but weird in many ways.

• Mount options to improve ext4 file system performance
• Quantity.rb, “Units and Quantities for Ruby”
• Create schema-less, dynamic model attributes
• jsCrypto, “Fast symmetric cryptography in Javascript”
• Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study
• Gravatars: why publishing your email’s hash is not a good idea
• Reading Code: In praise of superficial beauty
• Introducing Cramp, “Asynchronous framework for the web”
• jQuery vs MooTools
• Useful Guidelines of CSS Code Structure for HTML 5
• Mocking and Stubbing can be evil
• Ruby SuperStruct: enhanced version of the standard Ruby Struct
• Form Element Borders
• Configliere, “wise, lightweight configuration management for ruby programs”
• Rails Best Practices

• Your Pages Will Load Faster with Rails!, so… Rails does scale?
• gimme three steps, something I didn’t know: Factory Girl includes Cucumber steps
• No returns, explicit returns that is
• RConfig, “The complete solution for Ruby Configuration Management”
• Welcome RoboDomain, “keep track of any domain in one single place”
• Announcing The Longest YARD: 0.5.0