I can’t remember the first time I used Vi or Vim. What I do remember is an old colleague espousing its virtues and after being wowed by the power of Vim macros I knew it was time to switch (I
Running migrations on multiple servers with Capistrano
Typically the sites I work on have a traditional single Staging server, and a single Production server. Recently I’ve been working on a client project where we needed the same database schema (and subsequent migrations) deployed to multiple target servers.
Leading kids to coding
In common with the majority of developers, what led me to get involved in ‘programming’ in the first place was the hope of one day creating my own video games. This seemed magical – but not too far out of
Managing multiple projects with tmuxinator
Being a freelancer I get to work on several projects at a time. When I started out this sometimes mean’t juggling several projects in a single day, but for my sanity’s sake I moved over a single project per day
Using the ‘after_party’ gem with Capistrano 3
One of my long-term client projects involves frequent data migrations (as opposed to the classical schema migrations one typically runs). Up until recently I’ve been creating standalone rake tasks to perform the data migrations and executing them manually when deploying
git svn clone/fetch yet no files? This might help…
I’ve just spent some time wondering why a “git svn clone <repo>” followed by a “git svn fetch” was producing no files in the target folder. This was puzzling, as the Subversion repository was upto version 423, and poking through
Old App Traffic Spike
Many moons ago (well, late 2006) I wrote my first Rails application, a dinky little GTD app named ZenLists. Now, I haven’t given the app much though for the last eighteen months, and the shocking confession is I don’t even
Rails 2.0 application checker
Now that the first release candidate of Rails 2.0 has been announced, what better time to check if your existing Rails app might need some TLC before the upgrade? Enter r2check, a small tool which does some regular expression searches
Functional testing of a Rails app with Selenium
How to use the Selenium test tool for functional testing of a Ruby on Rails and Ajax application. Link : Automate acceptance tests with Selenium Definitely one to add to every web developers toolbox in 2006.
Rails Deployment: Lessons Learned from James Duncan Davidson
James Duncan Davidson has published an excellent essary detailing Rails deployment issues. Jam-packed with practical tips. * Should I use CGI or FastCGI? * Should I use lighty or Apache httpd? * If Apache, which freaking version? * And how