This question pops up every now and then, and every time I spend time mulling it over. The apparent reason that I come up with is that I use the blog as my personal notebook. Every time I find something interesting and non-trivial I confront a dilemma: to put it in my desktop jots keeper, or quickly put together a blog post.

Recently I decided to try something new with my blog and started publishing almost ever single finding that helped me or someone I personally know. The bad interpreter thing, rails exception handler, whatever else deserving a word goes directly to the pages of this site. No matter how small the finding is, if I feel the need to take a note, it wins the elections.

An added bonus of this approach is that I’m building a searchable database of tips and tricks that I personally can get back to no matter where I am.

Certainly, nothing new… Just to shed some light on what’s going on.

Found this one. It sounds like a great idea to use a notifier in the production environment and get all the errors and unexpected situations in your mailbox.

Before now, I was sitting in the environment logs forever trying to find my way through tons of debugging records, now it all becomes a bit more straight-forward. Check it out:

Exception Notifier

Handsome guys from Rails Envy do a series of hilarious videos under the common “Rails vs. …” theme. I checked their latest “vs. PHP” and “vs. .NET” videos yesterday and have been laughing since then even when I slept.

If you have a healthy sense of humor, you are a Rails fan or simply ready for light critics, go ahead, check it out:

• Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
• Ruby on Rails vs. .NET

Also check their earlier flicks:

• 1 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs. Java
• 2 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Migrations
• 3 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Organization
• 4 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Changing Database

Don’t take it serious. I mean guys are having fun and exaggerating it a bit, but it looks like true more or less. Enjoy!

You know that I’m charmed with the simplicity and the development convenience of Ruby and Rails. I like how the authors of Rails thought out every little detail of their framework bringing it complete and consistent. The flexibility of Ruby language is so extreme that it makes every framework be more or less general for the effective use outside the boundaries set by the author. However, this very flexibility may turn the blessing into a curse, if you don’t know what to expect and where to look for answers to your questions.

Yesterday I found a growing, yet quite loaded, collection of links and cheat-sheets around the Rails kingdom. They all are nicely organized and easy to use. Hope you will like this little chest of knowledge and thank Ryan for his invaluable contribution.

Best of luck to everyone and have fun! Life is SO GOOD!

Here’s one article that grabbed my attention this morning. It’s a nicely compiled list of suggestions for Wordpress bloggers on how to optimize their diaries for search engines. It’s a bit technical, yes, but pretty useful and easy to grasp. Truth be told, the long tail of responses clearly indicates that I’m not the only one attracted by the simplicity of narration.

Every time I think I have already seen all the major wonders of Ruby, I stumble upon something like this.

Ruby continues to teach me one important lesson – BE CURIOUS. I am… by nature, but I still notice a tremendous change in working habits – following what-if and is-it-possible models more often than usual. I used to evaluate the answers on these questions basing on my knowledge of the language. With Ruby things start to look different. The flexibility of syntax is so high that I seem can’t build the complete mental model of the language (like an interpreter embedded in a head) and quickly answer what’s possible and what’s not. It makes me to go Googling more and more to find existing solutions. Sometimes (as in example above) they are so elegant that it makes me cry.

Old man’s note: This workaround for calling private / protected methods smells to me. How they different from public methods then if all you need to figure out how to call that you weren’t supposed is only two more grams of brain cells. Hmmm. Do I get it wrong?