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

• 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”

• 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

Do you think there’s enough links?

• NetRecorder, “Record network responses for easy stubbing of external calls”
• MailStyle, converts your HTML emails to use inline CSS instead of an external stylesheet
• Rackamole, “a rack application that traps user’s interactions with your web site”
• Faster, better, cheaper! TDD wins in a simple experiment
• NoSql Databases – Landscape, an overview of all the alternatives to SQL-based databases out there
• Reincarnation, making a Ruby class inherit from itself
• Cromwell, “allows you to easily protect your scripts from being killed”
• Rubinius 1.0.0-RC2 Released
• The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source
• SCSS, CSS-style syntax for Sass (branch of the Sass project)
• Steve Krug on the least you can do about usability, a recorded presentation
• Cappuccino Web Framework, makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser
• Bonus: An SD Ruby episode on the above
• Admin Noob, “System Administration for Noobs”
• Waging War on Whitespace (using TextMate), I wish this could work in Gedit

It’s been a while, but finally I can present a new bunch of links to you:

• Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking, it’s about time Analytics don’t slow page load down anymore
• Squad, a web-based collaborative code editor
• Oria, simple Ruby-based key-value store
• Godlike, I would buy a Mac just for this plugin
• Rubyconf in 22 minutes, yet another video from Gregg Pollack
• Introducing FasterScripts.com! Share Your Performance Experiences
• Ruby on Rails laptop sticker, it says it fits on a MacBook but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t fit on pretty much any laptop

• 25 Tips for Intermediate Git Users
• Scroll Clock
• Easy ESI, “Cached pages with dynamic partials”
• CanCan, “Simple authorization for Rails”
• Optimizing asset bundling and serving with Rails
• capybara, “webrat alternative which aims to support all browser simulators”

• Dead simple JavaScript Unit Testing in Rails
• Ninja testing your Rails plugins
• Writing great documentation: what to write and technical style
• When Rails Fails, obviously I complete disagree with what is stated in the article, but read the comments. Ryan Bigg’s in particular