Caffeine Driven Development

As you may have seen on Twitter I have bought a Mac. Specifically it’s a MacBook Pro with a 15,4″ screen and 2,53 GHz processor. It’s truly great but there’s a story behind the purchase.

Saturday this weekend my family and I was at a party. We left about 3 PM unknowing of what would meet us when we got home. We got back to our house about 11 PM and didn’t suspect anything at first. The light in my room didn’t work at the time, so when I got up I only noticed a silhouette of a cardboard box that had been torn apart lying on the floor. I wanted to turn on my old laptop but as I reached for the On button in the dark I discovered it wasn’t there.

“Someone’s taken my laptop,” I yelled and when I got down in the living room my mother said that her jewelry was gone. “The curtains are down.” “Half of our Xbox games are gone.” Someone had broken into our house and stolen things worth well over $5000 in total. Besides the jewelry, laptop, and Xbox games he’d taken a Canon EOS camera, a school bag, and many other things. The school bag, which was mine, contained my wallet (which contained my Social Security card) and our house keys.

We called the police and they inspected the house the next morning. As it turns out the same thing has happened to 17 other houses during the last three weeks, up until now, and the police reckon the same people are behind. The worst part was that my laptop was in fact backed up, but it was on two USB keys which were also in my school bag. Every tiny aspect of that laptop was configured to my needs, it contained the projects I work on (including work that had not yet been pushed to GitHub), family pictures, films, books, important legal and school-related documents, and many, many other things. It’s all gone and it makes me sad.

I’m going to spare you guys for even more depressing details, but what I’m going to do to prevent a similar situation in the future is to have Time Machine back up my new Mac on an external harddrive and hide that in a very safe place plus use an online service as extra security. If you’re out there thinking “that will never happen to me” I say to you: I thought too. But now it has and my life collapsed for a few days which is why I haven’t had time to tweet about this.

• Creating a Rails authentication system on Mongoid, part 1, part 2, and part 3
• Faye, “a set of tools for dirt-simple publish-subscribe messaging between web clients”
• vim-markdown, you know the rest
• Encryptor, “A simple wrapper for the standard ruby OpenSSL library”
• MiniFB, “a small, lightweight Ruby library for interacting with the Facebook API”
• Vagrant, “a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments”
• Programmers: What To Do If You Get Fired, another post from Giles’ blog – one of the most entertaining of its kind
• Bundler: Oh the fail I know.
• ShowFor
• Ruby Driver GridFS API Now Cleaner and Faster
• Models with js-model
• data_miner, “Download and import XLS, ODS, XML, CSV, etc. into your ActiveRecord models”
• Testing email delivery in Rails with Gmail & HTTParty
• LightMongo
• Mac Performance Guide
• GemInstaller, “Automated Gem installation, activation, and much more!”
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Flash!, from the author of script.aculo.us
• hub + zsh
• Custom Shoulda macros — a tutorial
• Rails 3, a 1-hour presentation from Yehuda Katz
• Getting started with automated testing in Rails

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

• Life Below 600px, fight the fold
• The $5 Guerrilla User Test
• From TextMate to VIM for Rails Coders
• Hobo, and you thought Rails couldn’t be more convenient?
• Browser Performance Wishlist, yes please
• Customized Google Forms, by Mocra – neat
• Optimize your PNG’s with OptiPNG, with zero quality-loss!
• Ruby’s Implementation Does Not Define its Semantics
• The Complete Numeric Class, from Ruby Best Practices
• Vimium, “a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor”
• How to spy on a Hash in Ruby
• The Skinny on Scopes (Formerly named_scope)
• Memoization and id2ref, things to watch out for in your mission to optimize application performance
• Spiking on a Rails 3 upgrade
• Official launch day: March 1st, of Codaset that is. With GitHub still being unstable after their host-move this is still a serious competitor
• MongoDB browser shell, like _why’s “Try Ruby – In Your Browser!” – but for Mongo!
• Notes on MongoDB, John Nunemaker learned something from this. That says it all
• Eloquent JavaScript, “An opinionated guide to programming” – readable online for free!
• Delorean, “lets you travel in time with Ruby by mocking Time.now”
• Using acts_as_archive instead of soft delete

• 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

• The Evolution of a Ruby Programmer, very funny
• Gem in a Box, “Really simple rubygem hosting”
• Writing contingent Ruby code with #retryable, take a look at my comment at the bottom, too
• Ripple, “You Got your Riak in my Ruby”
• Alter Table Rails Plugin, very neat – should be part of Rails core
• Getting familiar with Rails 3
• jQuery with Rails 3, why is Prototype even still the default in Rails?
• Easy version management for Rails apps using VersionMaster and Capistrano, nice
• aruba, “Cucumber steps for driving out command line applications”
• The Power and Philosophy of Ruby, slides from talk by Matz
• AbstractQueryFactoryFactories and alias_method_chain: The Ruby Way
• wtfjs, “a collection of those very special irregularities, inconstancies and just plain painfully unintuitive moments for the language of the web”
• Vim Tips for Ruby (and your wrists), pure gold as I’m learning Vim at the moment
• Refraction, “Rack middleware replacement for mod_rewrite”
• Rails Metrics: know what is happening inside your Rails 3 application, there’s a screencast!
• How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
• JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language
• Building Real-time web apps with Rails3
• Improved validations in Rails 3
• A Hint of Hubris
• Ketchup, “Tasty jQuery Form Validation”

• 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”

• Bye Bye Github, the recent outages have consequences
• The Initialization Guide, 10.000 words – Ryan Bigg needs your help to find mistakes in the guide
• Give Back to Open Source, a challenge Ryan Bates gives everyone in his 200th episode of Railscasts
• 52framework, the first framework to combine the powers of HTML5 and CSS3!
• D’Note, “will scan your source code for labeled comments, collect, collate and sort them, and then return them to you in a format of your choosing”
• Rake tasks to get database and table sizes, by Mike Gunderloy and Elad Meidar
• The Building Blocks of Ruby
• Rails 3 Routing with Rack
• Scope a variable to a block in your template code, from which I learned something new today
• ‘What’s New in Edge Rails’ Moves to EdgeRails.info
• Using Bundler in Real Life, which de-mystified Bundler for me
• Plugin Authors: Toward a Better Future
• Haml Sucks for Content, luckily it isn’t trying to be good at it
• sinatra_more, “Generators, helpers and extensions enabling complex sinatra apps”
• MongoDB is fast, surprised? No? How much faster, then?
• Memory leak patterns in JavaScript
• Javascript Objects – A Useful Example
• Why ruby? part three – method arguments
• toto, “the 10 second blog-engine for hackers”
• Customizing Generators in Rails 3, useful

The first beta of Rails 3 is out! These links are all related to the release:

• Is Rails 3.0 a Game Changer?
• Rails 3.0: Beta release
• Rails 3 Beta is Out — A Retrospective
• The Path to Rails 3: Greenfielding new apps with the Rails 3 beta
• Five Things You Can Do Today to Make Your App Ready For Ruby on Rails 3
• Signed and Permanent cookies in Rails 3
• The Rails Module (in Rails 3), that provides you with the root, env, and logger class methods
• Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources To Get You Going, in which my Rails 3 generator guide is included!
• Is Your Plugin Ready For Rails 3?, also included in the collection above but this is worth highlighting
• Bundle me some Rails, things to keep in mind while using Bundler

Un-related to the release:

• A Note on the Recent Outages, GitHub had three major outages this week – this is why
• Web Translate It, “sync your translations between your Rails app and Web Translate It”
• EventCalendar, “Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows”
• script/migrator for navigating migrations
• Trunks, “simple, developer focused source control at spouse-friendly prices” (and they’re free until they go out of beta!)
• Watch your self, brittle title but the article talks about blocks + instance_eval gotchas
• jQuery 1.4, MooTools 1.2 Compared
• Free Rails 3 upgrade screencast, and it’s live coding!

• 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”

• 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