Rails Coach by Charles Max Wood » Blog Posts

Book Review: Refactoring in Ruby

Chuck — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:51:07 +0000

I recently read Refactoring in Ruby. There were several things I really liked about the book and one flaw that caused me some problems. The first thing I liked about the book was the way it pointed out code smells and how to identify them. I found several things that really affected the way I [...]

What happened to Rails Coach?

Chuck — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:38:40 +0000

I’ve decided to merge http://charlesmaxwood.com with http://railscoach.com. The efforts on both sites seem to run in parallel with one site providing audio content in the podcast and the other providing content in test. I feel like I can then focus all of the great stuff I’m doing on this one blog. This provides you a [...]

More ActiveRecord Notes

Chuck — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:07:53 +0000

I started reading ActiveRecord::Base a few days ago and found 8 things that I didn’t know about that it offered. I also only made it about 1/4 of the way through the code. Here are a few new things I’ve learned upon further reading: 1. Find by multiple ids Not only can you find a [...]

Notes from Reading ActiveRecord::Base

Chuck — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:19:18 +0000

I’ve been trying to read more code lately and figured that I’d be best served by reading code I use frequently. Here are some notes of things I gathered from reading the ActiveRecord base.rb file. 1. Handling large query parameter sets You can do safe queries by specifying your query arguments as a has, rather [...]

Ruby and Beanstalkd

Chuck — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:38:09 +0000

Recently at work, we were having some problems with our application. Most of the problems stemmed from the complicated nature of the application and some poor design that we had been trying to patch up for months. Finally, in November, we got clearance from my boss to rebuild the application as a series of mini-applications [...]

Continuous Integration and CruiseControl.rb

Chuck — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:23:55 +0000

At work, we recently got all of our spec passing and determined that we needed to stay on top of keeping the test suite updated so that we knew that the quality of our product wasn’t compromised. To solve this, we implemented continuous integration with CruiseControl.rb. Continuous Integration The idea is to provide regular checks [...]

New Podcast: RailsCoach.com – Your Chance to Win Camtasia (for Mac or Windows)

Chuck — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:53:49 +0000

Lately, I’ve been working on creating a podcast to help developers become better at their craft. The format will primarily be an interview with members of the Ruby and Rails communities on what they think make exceptional developers and about their contributions to the Ruby on Rails community. My first interview will be with Gregg [...]

Rails Templates: My Template

Chuck — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:43:43 +0000

I just read the article by Pratik Naik from the Rails Core Team regarding Rails Templates. Have you ever wished you could start out your Rails application with all of your gems installed and all of your standard setup items completed? Well, wait no longer. You can now do it with Rails Templates. Pratik covered [...]

Deployment with Capistrano

Chuck — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:06:17 +0000

One problem that seems to face people when they’re attempting to move their applications into production is the best way to manage deployment of their application. This is where tools like capistrano comes in. Capistrano was written by Jamis Buck of 37signals. In a lot of ways it has become the defacto way to deploy [...]

Recent Outage and New Hosting

Chuck — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:43:01 +0000

I just switched my hosting from RapidVPS to SilverRack. You may have noticed the outage today as I moved the blog over. It did present a few issues, but I think I have them all figured out. Please let me know if you notice anything by emailing me at chuck@charlesmaxwood.com. I’m also trying to get [...]

Correcting Testing Mistakes: Taking Test Suite Runtime From 3 Hours to 14 Seconds

Chuck — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:35:59 +0000

Last week, my development team and I ran across a problem with a library we had written several months before that parsed spreadsheets given to us by one of our clients and inserted the data provided into the database. At the time we weren’t sure what the problem was. We decided to run the tests [...]

Screencast: Basic Ruby on Rails Routing

Chuck — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:08:28 +0000

This is my first screencast. I’ve learned a lot about recording screencasts while doing this. The screencast was recorded using a free trial of Camtasia for Mac. The trial is up in 30 days, so I’d really appreciate donations to help me get ScreenFlow so I can continue to produce screencasts. In the meantime, here’s [...]

CharlesMaxWood.com – A New Focus

Chuck — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:37:46 +0000

When I first set up this blog and purchased the domain, I intended to post about any technology that I came in contact with. However, after owning it for a year and not really putting anything into it, I determined that I would post about what I enjoyed the most—Ruby on Rails. Over the last [...]

Data Seeding in Ruby on Rails 2.3.4

Chuck — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:37:44 +0000

I just started building a new Rails application in version 2.3.4. One feature that I thought was particularly handy is the data seeding that is now built into Ruby on Rails. Before this feature, you would have to do one of two things. You could seed your data in your migrations. The problem with this [...]

Ruby 5 and Rails Envy Revisited

Chuck — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:04:06 +0000

About a month ago, I wrote about the splitting up of the dynamic duo—Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack—that made up the Rails Envy team. Since then, we’ve seen 7 episodes of Ruby5 and 2 episodes of Rails Envy come out. Now that we’ve gotten a good feel for what each is doing with his podcast, [...]

8 Lessons From Corey Haines’ Performance Kata

Chuck — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:52:21 +0000

Gregg Pollack posted this video to the Envy Labs Blog. It’s a terrific example of Test Driven Development. Here is the video and 8 lessons you should learn from it. 1. Performance Katas Have you ever read a book or watched a presentation and learned something really interesting only to forget it a week or [...]