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

• HTML-Ipsum, designing with real data/content is still better, though
• Canable, simple permissions for Rails by John Nunemaker
• Using Sinatra to test remote services in Rails, “gem that provides a simple interface to instantiate that Sinatra application and to manage the mocked webservice interface”
• Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB and Notes from a production MongoDB deployment, from BoxedIce
• Mongrations, “Migrations for MongoMapper”
• Branch Lists and Introducing GitHub Compare View, new awesome features on GitHub
• Environment specific files and gitignore
• Zen, “a simple, flexible, and cost-effective way to manage your work”
• Fear and Loathing in JavaScript DSLs
• How NodeJS saved my web application
• Schema-Free MySQL vs NoSQL
• Practical Uses of CSS3
• AuthlogicGenerator, “generator plugin for authlogic”
• Gist: The Script, “Absolutely the best command line gister”
• Unobtrusive, yet explicit
• Metaprogramming: Ruby vs. Javascript
• SnippetStash, “Store, organize, and share your code snippets with others”

• MongoTips, another blog by John Nunemaker
• Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, I bought it and it was money well spent. Yours for $12
• HolyGrail, “execute browser-less, console-based, javascript + DOM code right from within your Rails test suite”
• XRefresh, “browser refresh automation for web developers”
• Beware of XHTML, a true eyeopener. You should read it!
• Rails 3 Generators: The Old Faithful
• Building Real-time web apps with Rails3
• Stubbing :new Considered Harmful
• Rails, Slashdotted: no problem
• Avoiding Rails 3 Dependency Hell With RVM
• Smooth Devoperations: Deploying Rails 3 with Moonshine
• Complex Nested Forms with Rails and Unobtrusive jQuery
• EZ-CSS
• RubyGems.org move complete, after several months of hard work
• Use a 503 for your Rails maintenance page

• Monitoring Delayed Job with Bluepill and Capistrano
• Let Them Code Cake!, what a great idea! (No, seriously)
• Git 1.6.6.2, upgrade time!
• Bundler Schmundler
• Aliasing a method vs. defining a new one calling the old one – What’s fastest?, the code and results of the benchmark I did yesterday
• Rake task for deploying to Heroku, neat
• José Valim and Carl Lerche joins Rails core, not surprising at all
• Congratulations, great post by Ryan Bigg demonstrating how you benefit from “doing things right”
• Contacts, “A universal interface to import email contacts from various providers”
• Uniform, style checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, and file upload inputs with jQuery
• Sexp for Rubyists, watch the video – it’s very cool
• How to make an RSS feed in Rails, which is in fact exactly what the article is not about
• Ruby Quicktips, “short, interesting and practical tidbits of the Ruby language and Ruby on Rails framework”

• Friendly, “NoSQL with MySQL in Ruby”
• smart_cookie_store, “Fixes the Rails CookieStore lazy loading so that empty sessions don’t get sent to the client”
• Delayed::Paperclip, “Process your Paperclip attachments in the background with delayed_job”
• Rack::ForceIE7, forces IE8 into IE7 compatibility mode, making it behave like IE7
• Rails 3 I18n changes
• Creating macros in vim
• Why use HAML (and SASS)? I already know HTML
• 3 times ActiveSupport 3, “3 random new methods added to ActiveSupport”
• Ruby on Rails 3.0 Beta Release Notes
• Where did the scripts go?, where the scripts that was moved out of the script/ directory went
• Where’s Waldo: Track user locations with Node.js and Redis
• The Four Cs of JavaScript, “some of JavaScript’s more useful features and patterns”
• GMoney, “A RubyGem for Interacting with the Google Finance API”

• 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!

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

• Phone, “Ruby library for phone number parsing, validation and formatting”
• BloomFilter, “Counting Bloom Filter implemented in Ruby”
• Rack 1.1 released, it includes new features, optimizations, and fixes
• Things UNIX can do atomically
• REWORK website launched, the new business book from 37signals is online
• Automate Your AJAX Web Acceptance Tests with a Domain Language
• Slurper, “Gem for slurping plain text stories into Pivotal Tracker”
• Test Driven Development: Why it’s awesome
• Fun With Box Shadows