Why, I’m glad you asked! It’s been a while since I’ve made any updates about Squeel — since before RailsConf, actually! A lot’s been added since then.
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Confounding URL typists since 2007.
Why, I’m glad you asked! It’s been a while since I’ve made any updates about Squeel — since before RailsConf, actually! A lot’s been added since then.
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I just read the blog post that got some traction on HN last night, entitled “What the hell is happening to rails?” It goes on to list a litany of complaints against changes in Rails 3.x, ranging from the default commenting of the catch-all route to, yes, of course, CoffeeScript. They all end up sounding a lot like “I don’t like change,” an argument we’ve all heard before. The difference is that Steve Coast, the post’s author, casts himself in the role of a crusader for the newbies. He says that he, personally, “gets” why these changes were made, but that the most recent versions of Rails are actually harder to learn than the older ones were. The post highlighted two things, to me:
As I see it, any reasonable plan for scaling web applications is going to address 3 questions:
So, how do we address these questions? Well, first, we remember that to the end user, the perception that the application is functioning correctly and with reasonable speed is of topmost importance. Everything else lines up behind these two considerations. Since perception is reality, we quickly discover that we can cheat, and the challenge comes in determining where, when, and how to do so.
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Today, I’m feeling mostly recovered from my first ever RailsConf, so I thought I would take some time to reflect on what I learned there, and share it with you, my dear reader. So, here we go, in no particular order…
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Recently, I stumbled upon a fork of one of my projects in which someone made a really intelligent-sounding commit: “Remove needless indirection of alias_method_chain.” He used the term indirection, so I was duly impressed, and my curiosity was piqued: had I sinned against the programming gods and used an alias_method_chain when it wasn’t needed? No, I hadn’t. alias_method_chain is frequently abused in the Rails world, but it wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a valid use case.
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Good evening, Internet! I hope you had a wonderful and productive workday. Now, with those pleasantries out of the way, I’d like to point you in the direction of a little gem called attr_bucket that I am regretful for having written even as I type this blog post suggesting you go try it. That is because this gem, while tiny and unassuming, has tremendous potential for evil.
37signals recently announced that they intend to drop support for OpenID authentication in their products. Good move. Even as a geek — someone who understands the reasoning behind OpenID — I’ve always found the actual implementations of OpenID to be needlessly cumbersome. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about how a parenthetical in a comment by DHH on a HN post about the news helped me realize something huge about my experiences in the open source community.
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