Jason Seifer

Rails 3.0 rc2 Notes

Jason — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:00:07 +0000

With the recent release of Rails 3.0 Release Candidate 2, DHH posted on the official Rails blog to check out the sweet GitHub compare view between the two RCs for detailed information. This list is by no means complete but I made some notes from the commit view, with links where possible, about the bigger changes:

Add a header that tells Internet Explorer (all versions) to use the best available standards support. [Yehuda Katz]
Rename _snowman to _e. Update: This was later updated to utf8 as Kieran and Santiago point out in the comments.
Mysql2 is now the default mysql adapter.
render :file is deprecated in favor of render :template except for absolute paths.
Apps upgrading from version 2.3 get defaulted to utf-8.
Update documentation on autosave.
Several performance improvements mostly by tenderlove.
Tons of deprecations.
Require rdoc version 2.5.10
Require rack-mount 0.6.12

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Genius Pool Supports Twitter Integration

Jason — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:11:20 +0000

This has been around for a little while now, but Genius Pool now has Twitter integration when a new job is posted. Check it out and post a job.

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Developer Job Board I’m pleased to announce the Genius Pool job board. This...

Mac OS X Post Install Guide, May 2010

Jason — Wed, 05 May 2010 16:37:23 +0000

Part 1: Update Software

This takes a while. Go get some coffee and install the developer tools.

System Settings

Appearance

Place scroll arrows at top and bottom. This is a left over windows preference I just can’t get used to.

Finder

Add delete and get info to toolbar. I’m of the opinion that this should be the default.

Keyboard

The Keyboard is a pretty big deal for developers. Here are my settings:

Get some Emacs keybindings in all of cocoa:
http://www.gnufoo.org/macosx/. I’m a vim guy but they’re useful.

Modifier keys, set caps lock to control. Allow Full keyboard access also.

Uncheck "Illuminate keyboard in low light conditions" for better battery life.

Apps

BetterTouchTool
Adds a bunch of configuration options for the Magic Mouse. I set a 3 finger tap for spaces. It’s handy.
Dropbox
Effortlessly sync files across computers. If you use the link above I get some free space. Use this one for a referral free link if you prefer.
Skitch
Capture screenshots, share images. This has become so ingrained in my day to day use I don’t know what I’d do without it.
Evernote
Enhanced syncable notepad. I use this for everything from code snippets to projects notes, recipes, and everything in between.
Google Chrome Beta
I couldn’t do without it. Spice it up with some developer extensions and you’re good to go.
Mailplane
Gmail on the desktop. I’ve tried almost every os x mail solution and couldn’t get more productive than Gmail. However, I still keep Mail.app configured in case I need to refer to old mail offline.
Textmate
This is practically a necessity. The best text editor on OS X.
MacVIM
It’s no emacs but it’s good to have around.
iStat Menus

Find out useful information about what’s going on in your system. I mainly use this for the calendar widget in the menu bar. Why this isn’t an option in OS X by default I’m not sure. It recently became a paid app and I upgraded immediately.
Concentrate
Eliminate distractions. I’ve written about this one before in my Using concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique post.
Adium
Multi protocol IM client. I use it when not forced to use iChat by others.
Skype
Needed for work and for recording podcasts.
BusyCal
Think of it as iCal pro. I like this better for syncing with Google Calendar.
Things
The best to do list app on OS X.
LaunchBar 5
LaunchBar is an app launcher and more. Although, to be fair, I’m giving Alfred a shot right now, too.
SuperDuper!
I don’t even use Time Machine because of SuperDuper! It’s a great backup program, though the target is a bit different than Time Machine. It’s well worth the money because of the smart backup feature.
Choosy
Choosy is a “better default browser” for os x. It lets you choose which browser you want to open a link in. It’s really invaluable when you get used to it.
TrueCrypt
Described on the web site as “Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.” I use it for an encrypted disk image where I hold my financial information. This image is kept in my Dropbox and synced when ever it’s unmounted automatically.
Tweetie
My favorite OS X Twitter client so far.
RSS Menu
RSS Menu lets you track rss feeds in your menu bar. I don’t have all my feeds in here but a few select ones, like twitter searches that I want to pay attention to.

Developer Stuff

Git branch in Bash Prompt. This goes in ~/.bash_profile:

parse_git_branch() {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/\ →\ \1/'
}
 
export PS1='\[\e[1;37m\][\[\e[1;35m\]\u\[\e[1;37m\]@\[\e[1;32m\]\h\[\e[1;37m\]:\[\e[1;36m\]\w\[\e[1;33m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\e[1;37m\]]$ \[\e[0m\]'

This will make your prompt look like this:

Git config (~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
	st = status
	co = checkout
	br = branch
	ui = update-index
	lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %f %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

Domain checking obsession. Put this in ~/.bash_profile, courtesy of Chris Wanstrath:

function isreg {
	whois $1 | grep -q 'No match' && echo "No" || echo "Yes"
}

Use as follows:

$ isreg jasonseifer.com
Yes

Put the following in ~/.inputrc. Create it if it doesn’t exist. Paste in the following:
```
set show-all-if-ambiguous On
set completion-ignore-case on
"\ep": history-search-backward
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
```
Now you can use tab to auto complete ignoring case and also suggest more options. The history search stuff lets you use the up arrow to search backwards through your history by typing in the first few letters of a command you’ve typed before and going back through. It’s like ctrl+r but easier.

Install Homebrew. Then:

  brew install wget
  brew install git
  brew install mysql

Ruby:

First thing’s first. The version of rubygems that comes with Snow Leopard is a bit outdated. Update it:

sudo gem update --system

RVM is the Ruby Version Manager. It lets you have multiple versions of Ruby installed on you system. But it’s much more than that. You can also have gemsets which are preconfigured sets of gems. I’ve been using one gemset per project.

Local rack apps can easily be hosted with Passenger Pane. Then you can also set up your rdocs for local viewing without using gem server. The instructions in the article still work, you just need to keep an old version or rdoc installed.

mategem command to edit a gem in Textmate with completion:
```
_mategem()
{
    local curw
    COMPREPLY=()
    curw=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
    local gems="$(gem environment gemdir)/gems"
    COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '$(ls $gems)' -- $curw));
    return 0
}
complete -F _mategem -o dirnames mategem
```
PeepOpen is a new application from PeepCode that gives you a smarter fuzzy file search (like in TextMate) and also works in MacVim and Emacs. It really helps out in MacVim and is much easier to configure than the fuzzy file finder plugin.

Wrapping Up

This isn’t everything I use but It’s a pretty good start. If you have any must have apps or dev environment shortcuts, please post in the comments.

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Friends Around Me

Jason — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:55:40 +0000

I’d like to congratulate Friends Around Me with their official launch today. I was involved with doing some back-end development for this project. It’s mainly an iPhone (and iPad!) app with a Rails back-end. It’s a great idea from a very talented group of people whom I was lucky to work with. Check out the site or grab the app from iTunes.

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Rails Envy

Jason — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:06:40 +0000

Many have asked what happened to Rails Envy. I thought I’d tell a personal story to complement Gregg’s recent post. Fair warning: this gets a bit personal at times.

A Brief Bit About Me

I went to school for Psychology where I got a Bachelor of Science at the University of Central Florida. I took some programming classes but was always a "closet geek." I’ve been programming since I was 6 years old and Ruby and Rails just felt right when I found it. Even more so after coming from PHP, Perl, C, and (shudder) some MS Access coding. Right around when I was finishing college I started attending ORUG meetings and some hackfests. This is where I met Gregg Pollack. We got along great, especially with coding.

Where Rails Envy Came From

I think I attended all but the first Orlando Ruby Users Group and occasionally gave presentations. On the Tuesday, November 14th meeting I gave a presentation on using RJS in Rails. I actually thought it was a good idea to use the term "AJAXified" in a presentation description, but I digress. That night I was joking around with someone and we decided a local developer had "Rails Envy." At the time, I thought it would make a pretty funny Rails focused blog name so I registered the domain. Then I sat on it for a while.

At some point in all this, Gregg, who has his Patched Software consultancy at the time, asked me to come work for him on a contract basis because he needed help on a project. This actually terrified me at the time. What would I do when the contract ran out? How would I find other work? I was pretty fresh out of college and hadn’t considered going contract. After talking it over with a lot of people, I quit my job.

Full Time to Contract

This picture has nothing to do with the paragraph, but it’s from that time period.

Coming from the full time employment world, working on a contract basis was a wonderful experience. I was working while wearing a t-shirt and shorts! Plus, the work was fascinating to me. I remember working with Gregg to solve some very interesting Ruby and Rails problems of the time. There were always people blogging but not as many as today and a lot of the time you had to dive deep in to Rails rather than googling solutions. It’s inspiring to see how far Rails has come.

After I working with Gregg for a little while I convinced him that we needed a blog. Gregg wasn’t convinced we were qualified enough to write a blog. I remember saying that we didn’t have to be because we had something to offer people based on our experience developing Rails full time. This was a different time — not many people were doing full time Rails work. We used railsenvy.com, set up Mephisto, and we were rolling.

We weren’t expecting the amount of feedback we got. It was great.

We Make Some Videos

I remember leaving ORUG one night and saying to Gregg "Wouldn’t it be funny if we parodied the Mac vs PC ads only using Ruby on Rails and other web development frameworks?" I was just joking but Gregg convinced me it would be a good idea to actually shoot these. I remember writing some script on a notepad during ORUG about a guy running in a track suit. I’m really glad that one didn’t make it in. Anyway, Gregg set up a writeboard (password: railsenvy), we bounced some ideas back and forth, got in touch with a friend of mine who did video work, and actually shot the videos.

Shooting the videos turned out to take a lot longer than I expected. It also was much more fun than I expected. I think the original set of four took nearly two full days including rehearsals. I still love the bear in a jar for hibernate. The videos went viral and that was awesome. I think I have a screenshot somewhere of 3 of the videos being in various spots on the front page of digg at the same time.

Gregg managed to get in contact with Chad Fowler and have the videos played at the first Railsconf. That was a truly exciting experience. I wasn’t expecting it at all and was flattered that they even considered playing them. After Railsconf we made some more. To this day I’m still embarrassed by the myspace one.

Hey, Let’s Start a Podcast!

I wasn’t much of a podcast listener. Gregg turned me on to the amazing Radio Lab and This American Life podcasts. I had noticed at the time that there weren’t any Ruby or Rails news podcasts. I remember it took some convincing of Gregg to get one started. My original pitch was something like "Just a five minute thing where we read what’s new. We’re reading all of the RSS feeds anyway" "Why would people listen to us when they could just read RSS feeds?" "Some people like listening to podcasts. And we’re funny." After doing some research on how to set up a successful podcast (Thanks Miles and Ryan!) we were up and running.

I learned a ton about editing podcasts. Dan taught me why I should use compression rather than normalization under certain circumstances. For the longest time, I used Soundtrack Pro to edit the podcasts. I think I did the first 40 episodes in Soundtrack before learning Pro Tools. Gregg and I would record each story separately and assemble them later. It usually took three takes if we messed up. Which was often. Looking back, I can’t believe I edited over 90 of them. Every week. It was a lot of work but I loved doing it.

Rails Can’t Scale

I think a lot of people were wondering why a Rails developer would be saying that Rails can’t scale, very often at least once a week. When I started this meme there were a lot of blog posts and questions about the time about Rails and scalability. People were citing Twitter as an example of Rails not being able to scale during their fail whale days. Java people were saying Ruby is slow. TechCrunch was all over it.

My idea was to make the expression "Rails can’t scale" so tired out that people would get sick of hearing it. When people commented asking me to stop, I knew I was doing a good job. Sorry everyone. But it was for a good cause. There’s a lot less sentiment these days about Rails not being able to scale. I’d like to think I played a small part in that.

Working for The Man!

Gregg and I were approached by Dan Benjamin about working for a startup called Helium Report (now Halogen Guides). We accepted. I got the opportunity to work with a kick ass team. I have nothing but praise and respect for everyone I worked with. We had our challenges but I think we handled them well. I wrote some pretty good code, if I do say so myself.
However, for reasons I’m about to outline, I wasn’t able to keep the job.

Tragedy Strikes

This part is difficult for me to write. Gregg mentioned in his post that I moved to Ft. Lauderdale for a year but didn’t say why. On May 1st, 2008, my mother woke up to find my father missing from the house. She was very worried and under a lot of stress at the time. My sister and I eventually found my dad, though my mother suffered her second heart attack while we were looking for him. She passed away a few days later.

Words can’t convey how deeply I miss her. I think about her every day. She was an amazing human being and I’m proud to be her son. I owe her a lot and I’m largely the person I am today because of her.

I’m not sure people ever really "get over" these kinds of things; rather, you find a new normal. I got a lot of supportive emails when Gregg announced this at the end of the podcast. I’m sorry if you emailed and I never got back to you.

I wasn’t able to keep a job while all of this was going on. However, everyone at Halogen Guides was ridiculously, above and beyond, supportive. For that I’m extremely grateful. I wish everyone nothing but the best.

Some Good Comes out of it

My girlfriend Candace and I moved to South Florida to help take care of my father. She selflessly changed jobs and moved in with my father and I. This sealed the deal in my mind and I proposed. She said yes. She’s a wonderful person and we’re getting married September 25th, this year. I couldn’t be happier, even though I’m a bit difficult at times. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get through everything without her support and the support from some very good friends. You know who you are. I thank you all deeply.

Wrapping Up

With me living in South Florida and Gregg in Orlando, each working on different projects, it started to become more difficult to do the podcast which was still going strong. We did our best but it started making more sense to split off in to our own companies. I started Twistedmind Inc. where, among other things, I offer consulting services scaling Rails. Dan Benjamin took over the reigns as co-host of the podcast, which we eventually moved over to 5by5. We also started The Dev Show to do a big longer discussion on general programming topics.

Moving On

Though we have mutually decided to take the Rails Envy web site down, I feel that Rails Envy, and what Gregg and I accomplished together, should be celebrated. I’m proud of the work we did and what we accomplished as a team. I’m proud of the videos, podcasts, talks, and client work we did. I’m grateful for the opportunities to have met and worked with so many people. It was a great experience. I hope to continue to set the bar high doing client work through my new company, Twistedmind (Hire me!), being a part of podcasts like The Ruby Show and The Dev Show, and launching projects like Genius Pool. I wish everyone the best. See you soon.

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Rake Tutorial

Jason — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:25:09 +0000

If you’re developing with Rails you’ve probably encountered rake once or twice. This blog post aims to walk you through where rake came from and an introduction on how to use it effectively in your Rails apps.

A Little Bit of History

Rake is the project of Jim Weirich. It’s a build tool. For a good laugh and an even more in depth history check out the "rational.rdoc" from the Rake documentation. Essentially, rake started as an idea for using Ruby inside of a Makefile. Though Jim doesn’t sound convinced from the tone in that document, it is a good idea.

What’s the need for an automated build system at all? As usual, Wikipedia has the answer:

Historically, developers used build automation to call compilers and linkers from inside a build script versus attempting to make the compiler calls from the command line. It is simple to use the command line to pass a single source module to a compiler and then to a linker to create the final deployable object. However, when attempting to compile and link many source code modules, in a particular order, using the command line process is not a reasonable solution. [sic]
As the build process grew more complex, developers began adding pre and post actions around the calls to the compilers such as a check-out from version control to the copying of deployable objects to a test location. The term “build automation” now includes managing the pre and post compile and link activities as well as the compile and link activities.

It’s about Dependencies

This may be a bit of a stretch to say but build tools are about dependencies. One file or set of files depends on another set to get compiled, linked, or other fun things before the next set can be processed. The same idea exists in rake with tasks and task dependencies. Let’s look at a simple rake task. Save the following as “Rakefile” in any directory:

  directory "tmp"
 
  file "hello.tmp" => "tmp" do
    sh "echo 'Hello' >> 'tmp/hello.tmp'"
  end

What we’re saying here is that the file named “hello.tmp” depends on the directory "tmp". When rake runs across this, it’s going to create the directory "tmp" first before running the "hello.tmp" task. When you run it, you’ll see something like the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake hello.tmp
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'

If you were to look at the "hello.tmp" file you would see the phrase "Hello". What happens if you run it again? You’ll see the same output again. What’s going on? Rake is generating the file again. It’s doing this because it can’t actually find the file tmp/hello.tmp from that definition. Let’s redefine the task:

  directory "tmp"
 
  file "tmp/hello.tmp" => "tmp" do
    sh "echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'"
  end

Now if you were to run it twice you would see something like this:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake "tmp/hello.tmp"
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  mkdir -p tmp
  echo 'Hello' > 'tmp/hello.tmp'
  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake "tmp/hello.tmp"
  (in /Users/jason/src)

Rake now knows that the file task has been run.

Running Other Tasks

Rake tasks can take the form of having prerequisites and can depend on another task. Let’s say I wanted to get ready in the morning. My process would be something like this:

Turn off alarm clock.
Groom myself.
Make coffee.
Walk dog.

Let’s further assume that I have OCD and have to do all of these in order. In rake I might express my morning as follows:

  task :turn_off_alarm do
    puts "Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though."
  end
 
  task :groom_myself do
    puts "Brushed teeth."
    puts "Showered."
    puts "Shaved."
  end
 
  task :make_coffee do
    cups = ENV["COFFEE_CUPS"] || 2
    puts "Made #{cups} cups of coffee. Shakes are gone."
  end
 
  task :walk_dog do
    puts "Dog walked."
  end
 
  task :ready_for_the_day => [:turn_off_alarm, :groom_myself, :make_coffee, :walk_dog] do
    puts "Ready for the day!"
  end

If I were to run this as is I would type rake ready_for_the_day and I’d see the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake ready_for_the_day
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though.
  Brushed teeth.
  Showered.
  Shaved.
  Made 5 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.
  Dog walked.
  Ready for the day!

By running the ready_for_the_day task it notices that the turn_off_alarm, groom_myself, make_coffee, and walk_dog tasks are all prerequisites of the ready_for_the_day task. Then it runs them all in the appropriate order. You’ll notice that we can pass something in to the make_coffee task. If we were having a really tough day we could pass in a value to the COFFEE_CUPS environment variable and be more prepared:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake COFFEE_CUPS=5 make_coffee
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Made 5 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.

Namespaces

Rake supports the concept of namespaces which essentially lets you group together similar tasks inside of one namespace. You’d then specify the namespace when you call a task inside it. It keeps things tidy while still being quite effective. In Rails, you might notice the db:migrate task. In that example, db is the namespace and migrate is the task. Using the above example, we might put everything in to the morning namespace:

  namespace :morning do
    task :turn_of_alarm
    ....
  end

Now if you were to run rake COFFEE_CUPS=3 morning:ready_for_the_day you would have the same output as above, only it only took 3 cups of coffee today. Score!

The Default Task

Rake has the concept of a default task. This is essentially the task that will be run if you type rake without any arguments. If we wanted our default task to be turning off the alarm from the example above, we’d do this:

  task :default => 'morning:turn_off_alarm'

Running rake now produces the following:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Turned off alarm. Would have liked 5 more minutes, though.

Describing Your Tasks

You can use the desc method to describe your tasks. This is done on the line right above the task definition. It’s also what gives you that nice output when you run rake -T to get a list of tasks. Tasks are displayed in alphabetical order. We’ll define some descriptions in our Rakefile (abbreviated for brevity):

  ...
  desc "Make coffee"
  task :make_coffee do
    cups = ENV["COFFEE_CUPS"] || 2
    puts "Made #{cups} cups of coffee. Shakes are gone."
  end
  ...

Now when we run rake -T for our list of tasks we get the following output:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake -T
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  rake afternoon:make_coffee      # Make afternoon coffee
  rake morning:groom_myself       # Take care of normal hygeine tasks.
  rake morning:make_coffee        # Make coffee
  rake morning:ready_for_the_day  # Get ready for the day
  rake morning:turn_off_alarm     # Turn off alarm.
  rake morning:walk_dog           # Walk the dog

You can add in a string to get tasks matching that displayed. Running rake -T af would show just the afternoon task.

Redefining Tasks

Let’s say you want to add on to an existing task. Perhaps you have another item in your grooming routine like styling your hair. You could write another task and slip it in as a dependency for groom_myself but you could also redefine groom_myself later on (shortened for brevity but you get the idea):

  namespace :morning do
	....
	task :groom_myself do
      puts "Brushed teeth."
      puts "Showered."
      puts "Shaved."
    end
    ....
  end
  ...
  namespace :morning do
    task :groom_myself do
      puts "Styled hair."
    end
  end

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake morning:groom_myself
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Brushed teeth.
  Showered.
  Shaved.
  Styled hair.

Invoking Tasks

You may at some point want to invoke a task from inside another task. Let’s say, for example, you wanted to make coffee in the afternoon, too. If you need an extra upper after lunch you could do that the following way:

  namespace :afternoon do
    task :make_coffee do
      Rake::Task['morning:make_coffee'].invoke
      puts "Ready for the rest of the day!"
    end
  end

Which outputs:

  [jason@brick:~/src]$ rake afternoon:make_coffee COFFEE_CUPS=1
  (in /Users/jason/src)
  Made 1 cups of coffee. Shakes are gone.
  Ready for the rest of the day!

A real world example of this is the rcov:all task. I use this in Genius Pool for aggregate rcov data. It’s shamelessly stolen from Clayton Lengel-Zigich. Go check out that post for a good example of invoking other tasks from rake.

Refactoring

You’ll notice in the example above we’re delegating most of the work to already defined methods and tasks in the RSpec and Cucumber classes. As a general rule, try to keep your methods already defined other places and call them from rake with your specific options and use cases. Let’s say I had a Rails application that e-mailed all accounts in the system that their account was expiring in a certain number of days. Here’s one way to write it:

  namespace :accounts do
    desc "Email expiring accounts to let them know"
    task :email_expiring => :environment do
      date = ENV['from'] ? Date.parse(ENV['from']) : Date.today
      accounts = Account.find(:all, :conditions => ["expiration_date = ?", date]
      accounts.each do |account|
        Notifier.deliver_account_expiration(account)
      end
    end
  end

A better way, that would let you test it more thoroughly would be to do the following:

  namespace :accounts do
    desc "Email expiring accounts to let them know"
    task :email_expiring => :environment do
      date = ENV['from'] ? Date.parse(ENV['from']) : Date.today
      Account.notify_expiring(date)
    end
  end

This lets you unit test your notify_expiring method on the account class and make sure that it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. This is a small, made up example, but you get the idea. Here’s an example from Resque:

  desc 'Restart redis'
  task :restart do
    RedisRunner.stop
    RedisRunner.start
  end

Notice the delegation to the RedisRunner class methods? This is a great rake task

Rails

You can get access to your models, and in fact, your whole environment by making tasks dependent on the environment task. This lets you do things like run rake RAILS_ENV=staging db:migrate. Rails will autmatically pick up tasks in lib/tasks. Any files named with the .rake extension will get picked up when you do rake -T.

Scheduling Rake Tasks

You can use cron to schedule rake tasks. Let’s say you wanted to run the account email expiration task every night at 12:15 on your production server, you might have something like this:

  15 * * * * cd /data/my_app/current && /usr/bin/rake RAILS_ENV=production accounts:email_expiring

Misc

Rake.original_dir gives you the directory that the original rake task was run from.

Derivatives

Thor is a more class based approach to solving some of the things rake does as far as actual tasks go.
Capistrano is the de facto standard for deploying rails apps. Its syntax is inspired pretty heavily by Rake, but it is definitely not rake.

Useful Rake Examples

Sample Rakefile from this article.
redis.rake from Resque.

If you have any more useful rake examples, please let me know and I’ll add them here.

Photo Credits:
Shaker rake by dicktay2000 on Flickr.
Toy sampling megaphone by altemark on Flickr.

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Developer Job Board

Jason — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:51:07 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the Genius Pool job board. This is a new job board for connecting companies to job seekers. With the connection to the 5by5 podcast network, making sure your job opportunity is in the ears of qualified applicants has never been easier. Why’s that? If you’re looking for a Ruby or Rails developer, what better spot is there than The Ruby Show? The same applies to The Dev Show. You can also be assured that whomever is applying has an impeccable sense of humor and taste.

So check it out if you get a moment or follow Genius Pool on Twitter for new job postings as they get posted. I’ll be doing some blog posts in the coming weeks about the process of launching your own project as well.

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Genius Pool Supports Twitter Integration This has been around for a little while now, but...

80s Me

Jason — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:34:11 +0000

This fantastic image courtesy of Peter Cooper.

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On Passwords

Jason — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 10:00:11 +0000

On a recent episode of The Dev Show Dan and I talked about passwords. In particular, the topic of password hashing came up. I’d like to say up front that I’m not a security guy and most definitely not a cryptographer. However, I don’t have to be because there are much smarter people who have already done a lot of work on encryption schemes and have done it much better than I ever could.

Above: discussion of best practices in passwords.

This should go without saying: you shouldn’t be storing your passwords in plain text in your database. Unless you need to be able to retrieve the password later, it should be stored in the database in a hashed format. Thomas Ptacek, a very highly respected security professional, explains all you need to know about passwords in this blog post. I’ll save you the trouble of reading the whole thing: just use bcrypt as your encryption scheme. It’s the slowest to generate the encrypted hash. By virtue of being slow to generate, it would also take a very long time to perform a successful lookup using rainbow tables. See that blog post linked for much more information and a thorough explanation.

Just how much longer does it take to generate? The following is a quick ruby program I whipped up to benchmark. It uses each encryption scheme to generate a password 50 times. The following was how long it took to run on my macbook using ruby 1.9.1-p378. You can grab the script here if you’d like to run it locally. It contains absolutely no tests which makes my inner Corey Haines frown:

  Password to hash: password
                    user     system      total        real
  MD5           0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001443)
  SHA1          0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001679)
  SHA256        0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.001308)
  bcrypt (3)    0.080000   0.000000   0.080000 (  0.086532)
  bcrypt (10)   4.550000   0.010000   4.560000 (  4.601996)

The differences between the (3) and (10) are the "cost" of generating the password. The documentation for the bcrypt gem summarizes that very well:

Takes an optional :cost option, which is a logarithmic variable which determines how computational expensive the hash is to calculate (a :cost of 4 is twice as much work as a :cost of 3). The higher the :cost the harder it becomes for attackers to try to guess passwords (even if a copy of your database is stolen), but the slower it is to check users’ passwords.

But I’m getting off topic. The reason I wanted to write this post was to create a list of popular open source software and see what kind of passwords hashing schemes are in use. Here’s the list I’ve compiled so far:

Django
Encryption Scheme: SHA1, MD5, or crypt
Notes: Previous Django versions, such as 0.90, used simple MD5 hashes without password salts. For backwards compatibility, those are still supported; they’ll be converted automatically to the new style the first time check_password() works correctly for a given user. More info:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/auth/
http://docs.python.org/library/crypt.html
MySQL
Encryption Scheme: Double SHA1
WordPress
Encryption Scheme: PHPass
Notes The awkwardly named PHPass library defaults to bcrypt (awesome) and falls back to DES or MD5 based salted hashes depending on the php version and supported features.
Expression Engine
Encryption Scheme: SHA1
Joomla
Encryption Scheme: MD5
phpBB
Encryption Scheme: Proprietary hash method using /dev/urandom and md5
ASP.Net Authentication
Encryption Scheme: Uses a concept of "providers".
Notes: There’s a BCrypt open source option available.
Rails: restful-authentication
Encryption Scheme: SHA1
Notes: This was the defacto standard for a long time in the Rails world as far as authentication goes. Changing the encryption scheme in an application would be a relatively painless process.
Rails: Authlogic
Encryption Scheme: bcrypt, aes256, md5, sha1, sha256, sha512
Notes: This is configurable to any of the listed options. Default is SHA512. The author doesn’t recommend using MD5 or SHA1 in the README but provides the options for migration and compaitiblity. How awesome is that?
Drupal
Encryption Scheme: MD5 by default
Notes: Christefano points out in the comments that MD5 is used by default but PHPass and AES are available via third party modules.

If you don’t see your favorite software here, either leave it in the comments or contact me and I’ll add it to the list. These are in no particular order, so I’m not trying to favor anything in particular (though we all know I’m mostly a Ruby developer).

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Rails Reminder: DATE_FORMATS

Jason — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:49:39 +0000

A friend of mine recently asked me about adding time formats to Rails apps. It’s not completely intuitive on how to add new "default" symbols for date and time formats or to get a list of the built in ones. The API has the built-in lists of constants under DATE_FORMATS but it’s a bit difficult to read on that page. Here’s a link to the current stable version of the Rails time formats: rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/time/conversions.rb. In order to add new ones you use the ruby strftime function.

ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Date::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!({
  :quick => "%m %d, %Y at %I:%M %p",
  :end_date => "%B %d, %Y"
})
 
ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!({
  :job_list => "%B %d, %Y"
})

This lets you do something like <%= model.created_at.to_s(:quick) %> in your code.

And here’s the strftime options from the cheat page as a refresher:

  %a - The abbreviated weekday name (``Sun'')
  %A - The  full  weekday  name (``Sunday'')
  %b - The abbreviated month name (``Jan'')
  %B - The  full  month  name (``January'')
  %c - The preferred local date and time representation
  %d - Day of the month (01..31)
  %e - Day of the month without leading zeroes (1..31)
  %H - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock (00..23)
  %I - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock (01..12)
  %j - Day of the year (001..366)
  %k - Hour of the day, 24-hour clock w/o leading zeroes ( 0..23)
  %l - Hour of the day, 12-hour clock w/o leading zeroes ( 1..12)
  %m - Month of the year (01..12)
  %M - Minute of the hour (00..59)
  %p - Meridian indicator (``AM''  or  ``PM'')
  %P - Meridian indicator (``am''  or  ``pm'')
  %S - Second of the minute (00..60)
  %U - Week  number  of the current year,
          starting with the first Sunday as the first
          day of the first week (00..53)
  %W - Week  number  of the current year,
          starting with the first Monday as the first
          day of the first week (00..53)
  %w - Day of the week (Sunday is 0, 0..6)
  %x - Preferred representation for the date alone, no time
  %X - Preferred representation for the time alone, no date
  %y - Year without a century (00..99)
  %Y - Year with century
  %Z - Time zone name
  %z - Time zone expressed as a UTC offset (``-04:00'')
  %% - Literal ``%'' character
 
   t = Time.now
   t.strftime("Printed on %m/%d/%Y")   #=> "Printed on 04/09/2003"
   t.strftime("at %I:%M%p")            #=> "at 08:56AM"
   t.strftime("%e %B, %Y")	       #=> "9 April, 2003"
   t.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")     #=> "2003-04-09T08:56:07" (EN 28601)

The preferred method for doing this is to add these in an initializer in your app. Something along the lines of config/initializers/my_time_formats.rb.

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Stand Up While You Read This!

Jason — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:15:36 +0000

The New York Times has an article up on standing while you work. People who sit all day without moving around much are at higher risk for medical problems typically associated with obesity. This includes doctors who even do the same job but just walk more during the day:

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

So part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

Obviously it’s not the best idea to take medical advice from an opinion writer but I can personally attest to the benefits of sitting on an exercise ball throughout the day for work. In addition to building core muscles, for some reason it helps me focus more on coding.

Here are a couple of quick tips on choosing an exercise ball:

If you plan on working out with one, get a high quality one so you don’t have to fear having it burst. Duraball and TOGU Powerball Premium are high quality ones for that. The Chek Institute has a good DVD for a home workout as well.
If you plan on sitting on one while working, get one that’s the next size up from the recommended size for your height.

Link

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Using Concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique on OS X

Jason — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:21:28 +0000

Concentrate is a Mac only app. It lets you do a number of things like block web sites, launch apps, play sounds, etc. Combinations of these things can be configured to go on for varying amounts of time. I use it for the Pomodoro Technique when programming. Corey Haines introduced me to Tomatoist when I paired with him during one of his journeyman tours. While that site is awesome, I prefer using the Mac app to force eliminate distractions.

The Pomodoro Technique

The root of the idea is that you program for 25 minutes straight and then break for 5 minutes. This seems like a pretty simple idea but when you’re working by yourself things can happen. For example, maybe you want to send a quick email to someone but want to refer to something in their Facebook account you can’t quite remember. So then you look it up. While looking it up you notice something else interesting by another one of your friends and the distractions start. By the end of the distractions you’ve ordered enough parts for a fully functional robot suit off eBay. If you only had 5 minutes to do this stuff, maybe that wouldn’t have happened.

Setting Up Concentrate

Concentrate is actually a very simple application to use. Click on the “New Activity Button” and set your options. I called mine "Program Pomodoro." It’s set to block any site that could potentially distract me, Growl a message, and play a sound on completion. The typical Pomodoro technique lasts 25 minutes so drag the location slider over until you see 25 minutes. Boom, good to go. Now you can’t look at anyone’s Facebook account or respond to any threads on hacker news for a good 25 minutes. You’ll get to that during your break.

The next task you’ll want to set up is the break. This is the most rewarding task. I just have this one Growl a message ("Get back to work!") and play a sound when it’s done. The duration slider should be set to 5 minutes.

Get To It!

That’s about it. It’s simple software and well worth the $30 to eliminate distractions. I use it only for those two techniques listed above and have been very happy. Special thanks to Corey Haines for introducing me to the Pomodoro technique.

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8 Chrome Extensions For Web Developers (Mac too!)

Jason — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:12:18 +0000

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser ever since 1Password came out with an extension for Chrome. The state of web browsing on the Mac still, unfortunately, leaves something to be desired. However, after using this full time for a little while I can say that I’m really liking it. As a web developer I have a need for good developer tools in a browser. For that, Firefox and Firebug will always be king of the hill. Daily browsing and light development in Chrome has been suiting my needs just fine.

The ability to have extensions is what really makes Chrome shine. It’s fast and nimble in OS X and I was able to recreate nearly everything I did in Firefox via extensions. The down side is that extensions don’t work on the latest stable build of Chrome. To use extensions you’ll need to get a beta or dev channel. In order to do that you can go here.

Eye Dropper
The Eye Dropper lets you click your mouse on an element to get the color of it in HSB, RGB, or Hex. This differs slightly from the Firefox extension in that there is a pop-up involved and you have to do one more click to get the dorrect color.

Firebug Lite
Firebug Lite is a not-as-fully-featured version of the very popular firebug extension. It’s fine for doing basic inspection of elements, though, and the built in console takes care of script running needs for basic experimentation.

FlashBlock
While Flash may be fine on PCs it makes the fan on my laptop spin like crazy. This is the equivalent of the FireFox extension and lets you whitelist sites as well. Browsing the web without flash is really a much more pleasant experience the majority of the time and the Flash files are only a click away if you want to load them.

MeasureIt!
MeasureIt! is a port of the same FireFox extension. It gives you a ruler that lets you draw a box around a portion of a page to get its width and height in pixels. It comes in pretty handy.

Sexy Undo Close Tab
This extension lets you re-open recently closed tabs. There’s another version called “Undo Closed Tab” but this one is obviously the sexier of the two which is why I use it. I mean, given the choice between sexy and non-sexy I think it’s a no-brainer.

Tab Menu
Tab Menu is a simple extension that gives you a drop down list of all currently open tabs. This is useful if you have a lot of tabs open and can’t see the titles. On one hand I wonder why this wasn’t included in the browser by default in some form. On the other hand I can completely understand their desire to not clutter the browser and I don’t imagine that the vast majority of people have that many tabs open.

RSS Subscription Extension
The RSS Subscription Extension automagically recognizes the RSS auto discovery links and pops open a new tab to subscribe. I included this for developers because you’ll want to make sure those RSS auto discovery tags are working. You could also make sure that it correctly subscribe in Google Reader and maybe take a few minutes off while you’re at it to read some feeds. Just saying.

SeoQuake
SeoQuake is also a port of the Firefox extension. It allows you to see a ton of info about a site including Google PageRank, Index, Delicious index, and more. I keep this disabled most of the time unless I really need it or want to see some information about a site.

Bonus Extensions

Chromelicious
Chromelicious is the best Chrome extension I’ve found for Delicioius integration. The reason is that view your bookmarks in an unobtrusive way from a dropdown menu and actually search your bookmarks and filter down via tabs. It’s prety handy..

GooglePreview
The Google Preview extension inserts thumbnail images of Google searches in your search results. This is totally gratuitous for any real work but it makes search results look cleaner.

AdBlock
This is the equivalent of AdBlock Plus for FireFox. It’s not necessarily for development but it is much more pleasant to browse the web with.

Better Facebook Fixer
Facebook Fixer is actually a user script packaged up as an extension. You can do this at the Script2Chrome web site if you have any you want to convert. This extension makes the Facebook experience a bit more pleasant with options like hiding information from the right column, hiding 3rd party apps, and much more. This is a version of the Facebook Fixer extension with the javascript loaded locally instead of another server.

Mouse Gestures

Something I didn’t really touch on was mouse gestures. I use them heavily. For that I use a program called xGestures which will work in any application on OS X. I find that to also be an indespensable tool. As a bonus it supports rocker gestures. I use that to go to next and previous tabs in all applications. A rocker gesture means you hold down the right mouse button and click the left. If you bind this to the keystroke command + { as a global gesture it works in almost every app in Leopard. The other bracket (command + }) works as well. This is not a free program but it is well worth the price of admission!

Wrapping up, Chrome has come a long way, especially on the Mac. The developer version, for me at least, has been extremely stable and works well enough to be my daily browser. Check it out if you haven’t yet.

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The Dev Show Episode 1

Jason — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:07:23 +0000

Dan Benjamin and I have launched a new podcast called The Dev Show. We aim to talk about new things in the programming community and point out things that may be of interest to developers. The first episode focuses on domain names, mongo db, javascript and a couple of other topics. Check it out!

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Live blogging BizConf Day 2

Jason — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:40:54 +0000

Day 1 of BizConf was phenomenal and I’m going to try and keep up the live blogging for day 2. I missed the lightning talks last night but heard great things from everyone who went. I’ve got my camera charged up today so I’ll try and get some pictures of the presenters as well. Fair warning: I’m really not that great of a photographer.

Roy Singham’s keynote
Corey Haines: How Agile Will Probably Fail You
Bruno Miranda: Successfully Managing Local and Remote Teams
Agile, Rails, and the Cloud
Legalities

Roy Singham

Keynote

Roy talks quick! I had some trouble keeping up with the wealth of information coming from this talk.

Randomness is a much greater predictor of success than skill. Decoy pricing is probably used a lot by consulting firms. It’s easy to compare a distorted version of something to the non-distorted version than to something else.

Think about your leadership. Write down your top 10 mistakes. Put them in to categories. People mistakes and investing in the wrong person. How you handle yourself in a crisis. When confronted with a huge number of decisions, how do you handle it? Are you confident?

A mistake is something you made in hindsight, not in foresight. The sign of really great leaders is to protect people who have different skills. You have to have people who offset your own weaknesses. Not trusting his gut about a certain person in his organization cost the company a lot of money. Even though he had a gut feeling about this person he forged ahead. Always trust your gut.

There’s no bonuses at Thoughtworks but leaders still focus on money. Even though we would like to believe that sales are driven by supply and demand, we’re closer to ducks. Take the iPhone as an example, and Starbucks coffee. Starbucks is not worth $5/coffee but we’ve been convinced it is. That’s how a lot of consulting companies charge exorbitant amounts.

Are they good at their job?
Does their boss recognize it?
Do they have friends at work?

The average 23 year old expects to have 12 jobs by the time they are 30. That’s almost a job a year.

Roy’s ideas for surviving a recession:

No matter how smart you think you are, you will still make mistakes.
Massively increase sales force.
Double intimacy with customers. Get closer to them. Understand your customer’s customer. If you can understand that, you will create more value for customers.

Take the biggest risk you can possibly think of to create new business strategies. Learn quickly, make it something you can live with. Thoughtworks is engaging five simultaneous new offerings.

A huge limitation of why we fail at software consulting is that people in the software industry aren’t generally aware of how their clients are feeling emotionally.

Think about what you want to be known for when you get older. Make a difference you will be proud of. Success should not be about how big your company is. It should be about how you change peoples lives.

Why Agile Will Probably Fail You

Corey Haines of coreyhaines.com

If you’re not familiar with Corey Haines, he’s a "software journeyman." He travels around and pair programs with people all over the country. I’ve had the opportunity to pair with him for a day and it was quite an experience.

Life rule #1: Any time you get to go to the scientist only section, you say yes.

Why do we write bad code?
This is not the question. No one likes to write bad code. The question becomes the following:

When do we write bad code?
When we’re under pressure and have to get it done. The deadline is coming and you’re only 80% done. There’s only so much time left so we start hacking away. "Get it done"e; vs "Do It Right". There’s a perception that when you have to get it done the only way to do it is to hack away.

Constant Pressure
Here’s an idea: if we have developers feel like they’re under pressure at the end of the project, let’s change the deadlines to every month. It would be great if we could let everyone figure out their own process. When people think of agile this is what they think of. Yet the issue of "Get It Done"e; vs "Do It Right&quot is still an issue. Most young people, in terms of a development perspective, only think about today. Scrum assumes that developers self oganize and are responsible.

Features and Quality
Let’s talk about features. Add a feature to your app. Change a feature in your app. Then time passes. As you work with crap code it takes more time to add features. This brings us to a definition of software quality: having a nominal cost of adding new features. It doesn’t mean there will be no bugs.

Software can be similar to gardening. Gardening isn’t about growing plants. It’s about changing the environment to let it flourish. Add a feature then clean it up. Change a feature then clean it up. Make sure your code base stays clean and boring to add new features.

"If I’m adding a new feature I don’t want excitement"

Why doesn’t everyone do the XP techniques?
We don’t know how. They’re hard to learn. While learning to do TDD a friend of Corey’s took a 70% hit in productivity. So how do you learn to do XP? Most small businesses can’t take that hit in productivity. Work is not practice.

Becoming a better software developer is about practice. How good would a band be if they only practiced while they were on stage? What kind of quality would a play have if the actors were only given the script an hour before the show? Enter the software craftsmanship manifesto.

Practice Techniques

Code Kata
Coding Dojo
Code Retreat
Acceptance Test-based

In the end I think it boils down to this: developing quality software is about taking pride in your work. The software craftsmanship manifesto gives you guidelines. The practices outlined above get you better at it. Take pride in your work and write quality code.

During this talk Jerry got in to a bit of a debate with Corey on practices. While the debate was lively and interesting, this probably could have waited until his talk was over rather than taking time away from Corey’s talk. There was about 25 minutes worth of content Corey didn’t get to. I’m going to be forced to find out about the rest of the content of this talk over scotch later. The horror. I’ll update this post later.

Successfully Managing Local and Remote Web 2.0 Teams

Bruno Miranda of Hoodiny Entertainment

Cyloop is a music site. The first version of the site was in Java. It couldn’t scale. The CEO of the company decided to switch to Rails and hired Hashrocket. They did the 3-2-1 launch. Hashrocket taught the developers, who were all Java, .Net, and PHP developers, about TDD and Rails. Hashrocket’s time lasted about a month. The app was re-launched in about 3 months total.

Having a local team is important. You have a lot of bandwidth to talk and communicate. It can also be distracting. The team uses headphones a lot to reduce distractions. It’s good to have the stakeholders in the same spot as developers. There’s five people in the Miami office, one in Orlando, and remote developers in Brazil. The team tends to type rather than talk, even in person. Typing tends to keep conversations more succinct.

Why go distributed? Bruno wrote a post on his blog about limiting yourself. The Ruby community is small and there’s not a ton Ruby talent in Miami. They would rather not limit themselves to just local talent, they want the best developers. Do video chats to hire people over-seas. Use other resources to find about people. Look at their GitHub accounts. It’s all about finding the right people and staying transparent.

Working with local and remote teams is about transparency. If you don’t know what someone is doing then how do you know they’re doing anything at all? If you don’t have a lot of throughput to talk to people face to face you wind up getting a lot of phone calls and meeting requests. Skype and AIM are “silo” based and talking one on one is probably going to be beneficial so move it to Campfire. Mac folks, check out Propane so you can get your name growled.

Communication
In another company, Bruno tried daily standups via phone and Skype but you always waste time getting the mic set up. Daily standups are done in camp fire. Standups are a one paragraph conversation with the rest of the screen. There’s a script that calls for the daily stand-up every day in the Campfire room. Don’t let your standup become a book. NewRelic notifications and incidents get automatically posted in to the campfire team room as well. There’s mainly one product with this company and you may want to move individual projects in to their own room.

They don’t pair all the time. They pair over iChat and Skype. Skype has better sound so disable the mic in iChat.

Projects are managed in Pivotal Tracker and meetings are done with the person who makes the decision. The whole local and remote teams are not included because there’s too many people. There’s a lot of streamlining of the communication process in this company. Your company has to be able to accept change to pull this sort of strategy off.

Conclusions
There’s a strong misconception that you can’t manage a local and remote team. It can be done and it can be done successfully, your organization just has to be willing to accept change. It makes business and financial sense and as long as you get the right people you get quality code. Bruno did a great job with this presentation and made some great points.

Agile, Rails, and the Cloud

Ian McFarland of Pivotal Labs

As developers, we build software because it’s cool, fun, exciting, and we love the challenge. Also it beats a lot of other jobs. Companies build software for different reasons. They do it to save money, manage risk, and satisfy business and government requirements. We’re in the middle of a revolution. This revolution in software is about one thing: building better value for businesses for lest money.

Software is expensive. The following are the most expensive with developing software: developers, defects, deployment, maintenance, and change. In the current economy budgets are smaller, the stakes are higher, departments have to do more with less, and failure is more catastrophic.

Agile
Agile is business driven: requirements come from business stakeholders.

The customer:

The customer is empowered to make decisions and priorities are set by that customer.
The customer can change priorities on anything unstarted.
The customer accepts the work in fine-grained increments.
The customer is intimately aware of progress and projected feedback dates.
Closing the feedback loop is critical.

TDD and BDD factors in to this. Good tests tell us when we’ve met the customer’s needs, what’s broken, and lets us refactor. TDD helps keeps you focused: you’re not building features if you don’t need them.

A big part of agile is iterative development. These days, iterations are getting shorter. Because the customer is seeing the work on a daily basis, the feedback cycle is short. This keeps the cost of change low by preventing unnecessary work.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Releasability
There is a bit of a misconception about continuous release. Just because you can release continuously doesn’t mean you have to release continuously.

Pair Programming
You have to pair if you want to be as efficient as you possibly can. As long as there’s more than one developer you’re already pairing. Doing it all the time means you get better at it. Pairing is effective because you stay focused. Developers can get distracted. It’s hard to stay focused all day. At Pivotal developers are exhausted at the end of the day their first week on the job. This is because they’re really not used to coding non stop for 8 hours a day.

Pairing helps because you don’t get stuck so you spend more time on the more interesting part of your code. Developers get more well-rounded as they pair. You learn from your pair — design and testing techniques, new development techniques, etc. As a business owner you’re investing a lot in your developers this way. If you’re not pairing you’re throwing that away. New team members can be brought up to speed in an hour when pairing rather than taking a week to figure out their way around. Another benefit to pairing is that you distribute knowledge more. Your bus factor (the number of people who need to get hit by a bus for the project to stop) goes up.

You need to make a productive workspace in a pair environment. Have consistent pairing stations. Pivotal will have breakfast available before the morning stand-up. The reason is that some developers wouldn’t eat breakfast before work and some would. This would result in some developers wanting to stop earlier for lunch than others.

Developer happiness is important to the business. Having a happy developer is important because developer happiness is directly correlated to developer productivity. Productive developers tend to be happier. When you’re doing grunt work as a developer things don’t seem as bad. Happy workers are more focused.

Rails
Rails is powerful. Rails goes very well with agile — it’s practically baked in to the culture. Anecodtally, Pivotal has seen a lot of improvements in efficiency with Rails.

The Cloud
You don’t have to worry about buying hardware anymore. You don’t have to be in the infrastructure business. You can scale on demand if you architect for it. You can stay focused on development. This is a big change in the industry.

The enterprise is not quite cloud ready yet. Lots of CIOs really want everything running on ahrdware they already bought. There are sometimes legislative restrictions about having things in the cloud. But it’s getting better. People run HR, CRM, and financials in the cloud now. The cloud is getting closer to being enterprise ready. There are market pressures being addressed every day by cloud offerings. These are all problems we’ve heard before.

In the end, it’s not about the technology. Businesses don’t care about technology. Technology is the means to an end. Think about the technology like a business. Think about getting it done cheaply, quickly, and well. This is why Rails, agile, and the cloud make business sense.

Legalities

Jose Gonzalez of Hoodiny Entertainment

Other than what you’re going to provide, when you’re going to provide it, and how much it’s going to be fore, everything is going to be specific for your business. Don’t accept sloppy code and don’t accept ambiguity in the business. If you and your client don’t understand what it means then a judge won’t understand what it means.

Trade Secrets
Under the law trade secrets are protected as long as they are secret. If you come up with something that is a trade secret the very nature of its protection is associated with its confidentiality. On the other end of this is patents which require you say as much as possible in order to obtain protection. To mark it as a trade secret it must be marked confidential. Do not let anyone see it who doesn’t need to see it. If a client has given you something that is a trade secret it should be market as confidential.

Some companies will put everything as confidential. Some judges will toss that out as a matter of course. As a consultant, everything you learn while in the client’s office should be treated as confidential. That’s just good practice.

Copyright
If you write the same ten word essay as someone else, both people retain the same copyright. Copyright is the right to stop somebody of copying your work. If you have created something independently from another person then you are not copying.

Trademark isn’t there for you. You need to fight to keep it.

If you’re going to do business, do safe business. Get business insurance.

Merger Clause
It’s a little thing at the bottom of the clause. Anything that anybody said prior to executing this contract in oral communications, written, etc, is gone. If it’s not in the contract it doesn’t exist. Basically, if you want something. Particularly for consultants if there were conversations you had with clients prior to the deal, put them in the contract or they don’t apply.

Understand the Client’s Organization
If someone is the CIO and they hire you, you generally don’t have to worry about hiring issues with them. A CIO would have "apparent authority." You need to make sure that the person who is signing the contract with you is authorized to sign the contract. He jokes that in a bank everybody is the vice president. Don’t negotiate with someone who is seven levels down in a company. You may have already given someone your best deal who has no power to execute on it. Understand the layout of the company before you make a decision otherwise you will be spending a lot of time and energy that might not even apply.

If you’re going to make a statement of work they should only have statements specific to the business and scope of the work. There may be times when you come up with a situation where you have an agreement where you have to change something with a specific deliverable.
SLAs are nothing more than a way of limiting liability in a specific circumstance. Be careful with them. If the SLA doesn’t meet what you’re looking for it overrides liability. Make sure you understand SLAs.
If you need something from the client in order to make something happen put it in the contract. Outline the client’s responsibilities.
It all comes down to this: protect yourself. See a lawyer and get a contract made.

Overall this was one of the most useful talks so far of BizConf. Jose thoroughly knows his stuff.

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Liveblogging Bizconf

Jason — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:03:10 +0000

I’m lucky to attend BizConf so I thought I’d blog about my experience here. I can’t promise to get every presentation here but I’ll try my best. This post will be updated as things happen.

Impressions so far: amazing conference. I’ve never been to a conference where so many people are having difficulty choosing talks because they all look so interesting and useful.

Opening Keynote
Selling Value For Fun and Profit
Learning to say "No".
Bootstrap Like a Missionary

Welcome Address and Keynote

Obie Fernandez, Hashrocket

Be controversial. But if you’re going to be controversial be prepared to take the abuse. In that respect, be confident in yourself but not to the point that you seem desperate. “He who cares the least wins.” This can be a fine tuned art or skill that some have innately and some have to really work on. Referrals are your lifeblood — try and get the most values out of referrals as possible. Obie shows a video where a client talks about what they’re doing and . As tech people we’re used to email and instant messages. But don’t do that. If there’s a phone number in an email, call the person! Keep a notebook to keeping notes and to-dos.

Lawyers cost a lot of money. If you run in to a situation where things can be difficult then make sure to negotiate at a time that’s good for you, and not when you’re under pressure. This goes back to not seeming desperate. Don’t do fixed bid contracts. Agile doesn’t work with fixed bid contracts. Charge what you are worth. Budget for both nonpaying clients and internal products. Use pivotal tracker.

Regarding agile, do it by the book first and don’t defend it. Be consistently excellent because perception is reality. Make sure you make it easy to see. If the client doesn’t recognize it then you’re not doing an excellent job. This reminds me of a quote by Richard Bandler – "The meaning of your communication is the response that you get."

He closes by saying don’t lose your sense of fun. Great keynote. I’m not sure Obie realized it but he demonstrated nearly everything he spoke on during his actual talk. This was a very inspiring start to the conference.

Selling Value For Fun and Profit

Randall Thomas, Engineyard

I came in a bit late on this. Adding features to a product actually changes the product. Example: BMW i-drive.

Simplify the complicated
Simplification is really important and it adds value. 37Signals is a great example here. Consumers actually face anxiety when they face choices no a product. Amazon is an example of things that are easy, like Amazon prime. Randall went from buying 3 or 4 things a year on Amazon to 3 or 4 a month

Educate an audience
As geeks, we like to educate. A good example of this is having APIs for your apps. Writing an API educates your audience about your app.

Preserve existing value
Once you’ve invested in something you have to preserve the value of it. He asks how many people have expensive electroincs. Lots of hands go up. How many have an alarm? Not nearly as many hands go up. Software is similar to this.

Selling Value
Value is the only thing that’s ever sold and bought.

Communicate Value
If you solved an awesome problem, make sure your clients know about this. If you solve a problem in 3 hours but don’t communicate how awesome that is compared to the guy who takes 300 and keeps in constant contact with the client, the client will see more value in the longer one. We have lots of ways to do this: email, sms IM, skype, etc. You’re not delivering value if your client doesn’t understand it.

Understanding Value
Your clients need to understand the value you provide. If they don’t you’re not providing that value.

Getting Paid
Do what’s valuable for a client. If you don’t understand what is valuable for a client you can’t charge correctly and get paid. Some people are more interested in how nice you were at a party vs how great of a programmer you are. This affects how you will get paid.

Open with Value
Before you start talking about how you are getting paid and what you’re getting paid, explain the value. Money is easy to communicate but value is not. Start with the value. A great example is NewRelic. Engine Yard lets people try it and they often upgrade.

Show Don’t Tell
Make value tangible. Agile plays in to this because of collaboration and communication. Example: saying a bomb can level a city vs showing footage of Nagasaki. When you demonstrate value consistently you preserve your value and get more referrals.

Price at Value
Not at cost. The value of something is relative. Focus and price at value. If you’ve done your homework, you know what the value is. Make all efforts to preserve that value because if you don’t it starts a bad precedent. "Protect the integrity of your fee."

Selling on value is based on trust and honesty. If you can’t deliver on a promise or slip on a promise this needs to be communicated. If not your value goes down. When you sell and get paid based on quality, you start focusing on craftsmanship, quality, and the art of it.

This was an great presentation and full of useful information that is applicable to almost everyone.

Fifty Simple Things that Can Improve Your Business

Jerry Weinberg of geraldmweinberg.com

Three things to look for when developing software:

Motivation

You can teach all you want. If you see an organization with no enthusiasm for what they’re doing they probably don’t have enthusiasm for what you’re offering.

Organization

Learn whether or not people are organized. If an organization doesn’t care enough to organize, nothing is going to happen.

Information
Information is not really enough. Strive to find out what’s really going on and what the real problem is. Example: "We have this software project that has been mishandled. It needs to be done in three weeks or the company goes under." In this instance you’re a scapegoat not an architect.

Figure out the real situation and act in accordance.

Jiggling
Like physical things, organizations can get stuck in a loop. You give them a jiggle and it helps them get back on track. At one campus a fire destroyed everything including data. One year later they were more efficient. A lot of times when you come in as a consultant you need to jiggle the company. It may cost you your job but it will be worth it to the company. If you do it nicely you may get repeat business. Agile is the opposite of stuck. A lot of problems aren’t the model but the organization being stuck in what they’re doing.

Audience Question: How can you get stuck in an agile process?
If you think you’re doing agile and not really, you can get stuck. If you’ve spent time and budget not giving someone what they want you run in to problems. If you have a client that doesn’t have an idea where they’re going to end up they may be surprised. You can deliver a lot of product without delivering value. You can be agile at the process level but not be agile at all.

Learning to Say “No”

Jerry Weinberg of geraldmweinberg.com

Jerry opens this talk by asking if someone had something they should have said no to but didn’t. Then the whole audience goes through and analyzes the situation with Jerry as the leader. He breaks down what was done well and what could have been done better. By using an actual example and getting the audience involved, we all got value out of this.

Here’s some things I got out of this presentation:

Your bottom line applies to everything. If you wouldn’t build something for free it doesn’t matter what else is offered.
Make the NO clear. There should be no ambiguities.
Do good business. If you can’t accommodate something, say no. It will be better than doing it poorly.
Word spreads around. As with the previous point, if you’re not doing good business people will know.

I would have liked to have better notes for this one but it was more of a participatory thing. Jerry did a thorough job getting his points across in this way.

Bootstrap Like a Missionary

Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com

Find ways in the door when you’re not supposed to be in the door. Find ways to get your message in the door. He gives an example of an ad company who he wanted to sell his ads. He was too small a company for them but didn’t give up. He called every day and they declined. Every day. Finally he drove down with a check for $2,000. They took a chance on him.

Start with garbage as your first product
Build your product in stages. He asked Christian Carter how he builds a product. The answer was "When I have an idea for a product, I buy an ad on Google and see the click rates." We then get a ton of examples from Andrew and the audience and the moral is the same for all of them: I wish I would have launched earlier. Your audience will shape your product more than you can imagine. You will have a better product for it.

Build an audience for yourself.
Some people build their audience by a blog. Some build their audience by message boards. Some do it by meetings. Do what works for you. We get some more audience participation for this one. Alex De Carvalho gets up and tells us about Refresh Miami and how he built the community. As in the case of Threadless, Magento, etc, you generally can’t buy the great press you get from involving the community and building your audience.

Get your members to recruit for you.
Viral marketing doesn’t work anymore. Hotmail was the originator of this by adding on to everyone’s email message. Viral marketing can it or it can’t. Some youtube videos get millions of views. For Andrew, this isn’t enough to build a business off of. You don’t want to build your business on hoping people spread your word.

Must Marketing
Andrew’s dad got Skype installed. His dad wanted a friend to use it so he installed it for his friend. Some popular restaurants don’t have tables for one. You have to get friends to go with you.

Rules for Must Marketing

It doesn’t work alone
You can’t have must marketing if you can do something alone. The big risk is that it could fail completely. That’s why you put out garbage first and iterate.

There should be accountability
People should be able to see whether or not you did something. An example is a Twitter post voting site. People could see who tweeted to vote for things and who didn’t. Then they would ask for people to vote.

The Recipient Needs To Be Able To Reciporicate
In the virtual gift example, a guy can send his girlfriend virtual flowers. When she gets them she can send some back. By converting the recipient in to the sender the loop continues.

Andrew has a ton of energy and really gets people involved in his presentation. It’s no wonder he’s a successful entrepreneur.

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Using the Rails logger outside of models and controllers

Jason — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:39:43 +0000

You can use the Rails logger outside of Rails models in at least version 2.3.X and up of Rails. You might be used to doing the following in your models or controllers:

logger.info "Some debugging info I want to see in my development log."

If you make a regular model that doesn’t inherit from ActiveRecord, though, you may see the following error:

undefined local variable or method `logger' for #

The solution is to call Rails.logger.info (or debug, or warn) as follows:

Rails.logger.info "Some debugging info I want to see in my development log."

I hope that helps someone.

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Getting RSpec and TextMate to play nice

Jason — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:17:08 +0000

Elijah Miller has a great blog post on getting TextMate and RSpec to play nicely together. This is pretty useful for just running specific spec files. Also, did you know you can get TextMate to automatically recognize spec files by naming them with the .spec extension and RSpec will recognize it?

Link

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Microsoft deems Ruby on Rails a competitor

Jason — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:47:17 +0000

Numerous commercial software vendors offer competing software applications for connectivity (both Internet and intranet), security, hosting, and e-business servers. System Center competes with server management and server virtualization platform providers, such as BMC, CA, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and VMWare in the management of information technology infrastructures. Forefront security products compete with McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro in protecting both client and server applications. Our products for software developers compete against offerings from Adobe, Borland, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, other companies, and open-source projects. Open source projects include Eclipse (sponsored by CA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP), PHP, and Ruby on Rails, among others. We believe that our server products provide customers with advantages in innovation, performance, total costs of ownership, and productivity by delivering superior applications, development tools, and compatibility with a broad base of hardware and software applications, security, and manageability.

via sec.gov

Emphasis mine.

Posted via web from Jason’s posterous

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Receiving Email with Rails

Jason — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:58:28 +0000

This article originally appeared in the first issue of Rails Magazine. It is reproduced here not quite verbatim with a couple of corrections and additions.

Photo from esparta on Flickr.

Introduction

Receiving email is a great way to add functionality to your application. This is one area, though, that is not very well documented with Rails. Sure, we have ActionMailer documentation, but how does something like this actually work in a production environment and what are the concerns? I had to tackle this problem recently and no solution that was “in the wild” would work with the requirements I had for this application. In this article, we will take a look at a couple of options and go in to detail with one method that has not recieved much coverage.

John Nunemaker, on the Rails Tips blog, posted a solution to this problem using GMail with IMAP to Receive Email in Rails⁽¹⁾. He uses a script to connect to an IMAP server every minute or so and polls for new e-mails. The Rails environment is loaded and if there are new messages waiting, this is processed using an ActiveRecord model. He uses the ‘Daemons’ library to keep the script running and give it start/stop commands and keep a pidfile.

This is a perfectly valid and functional way to process e-mail. The application I was working on, though, had to be able to handle and process e-mail in as little time as possible. People would likely be e-mailing things from their mobile phones and might want to check on them soon after an upload. At that point, polling every X number of minutes wasn’t a viable solution, so I had to come up with something else.

It’s also worth noting that polling for email should take in to account your user base and size. Let’s say that we have an app with 10,000 active users. Let’s also say that during peak times, they all decide to email our application. Finally, we’ll say that they are sending an average 5 emails apiece. With these hypothetical numbers, this works out to about 833 emails per minute. If your IMAP server is being polled every three minutes, that’s going to leave you about 3,332 e-mails to download and process each time.

Configuring Your Email Server

Email itself is a problem that has been largely solved. There are a wealth of email servers available but this article will take a look at Postfix. Postfix is most easily installed using the package manager of your distribution and may already be installed if you have a VPS. I prefer Ubuntu server side so this article will focus on that flavor. Just be aware that certain configuration file locations may vary depending on your distribution. So let’s get started.

First we need to add or change some DNS records. The instructions for how to do this will vary depending on how you have your DNS hosted. I personally use DNS Made Easy and recommend it to my clients as well, should they need DNS hosting. DNS Made Easy has very reasonable rates and quotas. Regardless of your host you need to create the following records:

An “A” record that has your domain name only.
An “A” record that is just "mail".
An “MX” record that is set to level 10 and points to “mail”
Optional: An SPF Record

OK, I was lying. The SPF record isn’t really optional. This is going to be a TXT Record and should read something like this:

	v=spf1 mx -all

There are several different variations you can use with SPF records but going through them would be beyond the scope of this article. Do some research and pick the combination that’s right for your setup.

Now, the first thing that you’re going to need to do is figure out what address you want to receive mail as. This is going to be your catch-all address. In this case we’re going to choose "killerrobot" because that just might keep spammers at bay⁽²⁾. I mean, who’s going to spam a killer robot?

Reading tutorials around the web or even looking in some books will tell you that you can tell postfix to forward mail simply by piping it in /etc/aliases. You might be tempted to do something like pipe everything to a ruby script:

# /etc/aliases
...
killerrobot: "|/usr/bin/ruby /var/www/apps/myapp/current/lib/mail_receiver.rb"
*: killerrobot

This, unfortunately, won’t work. If you do it this way, all of your scripts are going to run as root. This is not what you want and can be a security concern. The proper way to do this is with a postmap filter. Open up /etc/postfix/master.cf. The first line after all of the comments should look like this:

# /etc/postfix/master.cf
smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd

Add a line right below that to tell postfix that you’re using a filter:

# /etc/postfix/master.cf
smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd
 -o content_filter=myapp_filter:

Then go all the way down to the bottom of the file and add your filter:

# /etc/postfix/master.cf 
smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd
 -o content_filter=myapp_filter:
...
myapp_filter unix -     n       n       -       -       pipe
 flags=Xhq user=deploy argv=/usr/bin/ruby /var/www/apps/myapp/current/lib/mail_receiver.rb

The “X” parameter in “flags=Xhq” tells postfix that an external command performs final delivery. This is going to change the message status from “relayed” to “delivered”. The “h” flag sets the recipients and domains to lowercase, and the “q” flag quotes whitespace and other special characters. Now, reload postfix by doing sudo postfix reload. At this point, you should have a very basic mail server configured to receive email and put it in to a mail_receiver.rb script.

Handling The Email

We’re going to be putting all of our mail that comes in to a message queue and parsing it with the ‘mms2r’ gem. In this article I’m going to use beanstalkd⁽³⁾ but you could substitute your favorite message queue for this part of the architecture. I’m going to assume that a message queue is already installed and running and that you have both the ‘tmail’ and ‘mms2r’ gems installed.

We want our mail_receiver script to be super lean. It’s only going to serve one function: put the incoming mail in to a queue. We’ll process the queue later but for now we just want to get it in there and handle any attachments. We want it to be super lean because if we’re receiving a lot of mail we don’t want this script to be memory intensive or take a long time to start up or run. It will look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'tmail'
require 'mms2r'
require 'beanstalk-client'
 
message = $stdin.read
mail = TMail::Mail.parse(message)
mms = MMS2R::Media.new(mail)
 
if !mail.to.nil?
  BEANSTALK = Beanstalk::Pool.new(['127.0.0.1:11300'])
  BEANSTALK.yput({:type => 'received_email', 
    :to => mail.to.flatten.first.gsub('@mydomain.com', ''), 
    :tags => mail.subject, 
    :attachment => mms.default_media.path})
end

What we’re doing here is taking the email message from standard input and parsing it by putting it in to a TMail object. TMail is a great library that takes care of most of the formatting for us. It lets us do things like refer to mail messages as objects and use mail.to, mail.from, etc. If we have attachments, they’re going along as well.

MMS2R is an amazing piece of software. It works for both emails and, as the name implies, MMS messages as well. What makes it so amazing? There are dozens of different formats that an attachment can come in from both email and MMS. Different phone carriers each have their own way of doing MMS attachments, each of them slightly different. MMS2R alleviates the problem of trying to parse all of these different formats and does it all for you. In this way we can call MMS2R::Media.new(mail) and be done with it.

For the purposes of our example application, the user can tag the photos they upload by putting the different tags in the subject. We send that in as another option in the job hash for beanstalkd. Each user is assigned a unique identifier in their account that lets them send email to the application, for example “aslkdf32@myapp.com”. We grab the first recipient (mail.to) because that will come in as an array. We take the domain out and send that in as the “to” field. Finally, the temporary media location on disk that we parsed using MMS2R is thrown in to the queue as the :attachment option. Our mail is in the queue.

Processing the Queue

Now that we have our email in the queue, we need to get it out. For this part, we’re actually going to load the Rails environment. I have this in the lib directory. The code would look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'config', 'environment')
require 'rubygems'
require 'beanstalk-client'
require 'yaml'
beanstalk_config = YAML::load(File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/beanstalk.yml"))
 
@logger = Logger.new("#{RAILS_ROOT}/log/queue.#{Rails.env}.log")
@logger.level = Logger::INFO
 
BEANSTALK = Beanstalk::Pool.new(beanstalk_config[Rails.env])
 
loop do
  job = BEANSTALK.reserve
  job_hash = job.ybody
  case job_hash[:type]
  when 'received_email'
    @logger.info("Got email: #{job_hash.inspect}")
    if EmailProcessor.process(job_hash)
      job.delete
    else
      @logger.warn("Did not process email: #{job_hash.inspect}")
      job.bury
    end
  else
    @logger.warn("Don't know how to process #{job_hash.inspect}")
  end
end

The first line loads the Rails environment so we have access to all of our ActiveRecord models. We want to keep our code DRY and use only one method of processing an attachment, routing messages, or the like. If we were using attachment_fu or paperclip, we would keep this code in the model. You might even want to make a seprate class, such a presenter, for your logic. In this case the EmailProcessor class finds the user based on the reception_email attribute and then executes the “do_stuff” method to process the message. It would look something like this:

require 'local_file'
require 'tmail'
require 'mms2r'
 
class EmailProcessor
  attr_accessor :user, :options
 
  def self.process(*args)
    email_processor = new(*args)
    email_processor.do_stuff
  end
 
  def find_user
    @user = User.find(:first, :conditions => {:reception_email => @options[:to]})
  end
 
  def do_stuff
		# Your actual logic would go here...
  end
 
  def initialize(*args)
    @options = args.extract_options!
    find_user
  end
end

This uses the LocalFile class from Ben Rubenstein⁽⁴⁾

We’re not quite done yet. We need to make the mail_processor run as a daemon instead of just running “ruby mail_processor.rb” when we want to launch it. We’ll use the ‘daemons’ library for that. This will take care of setting up PID files and lets us do ruby mail_processor_control.rb start and ruby mail_processor_control.rb stop. We’re also using the “daemons_extension” file from Rapleaf that actually gives feedback on stopping of the daemon. The script itself is extremely simple and goes in the lib directory with your mail_processor.rb script:

require 'rubygems'
require 'daemons'
require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'daemons_extension')
 
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'development'
 
options = {
  :app_name  => 'processor',
  :dir_mode  => :script,
  :dir       => '../log',
  :backtrace => true,
  :mode      => :load,
  :monitor   => true
}
 
Daemons.run(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'processor.rb'), options)

Now just start it by doing “ruby mail_processor_control.rb start" and your daemon will be up and running. That’s it! You’re receiving e-mail to your Rails app. It is very important that you load the rails environment in your worker and not the daemon controller. The controller only manages the worker, therefore it won’t have access to the Rails environment and will error out.

Considerations

Depending on your configuration, you may want to use a different message queue than beanstalkd. I’ve personally found beanstalkd to be reliable but your architecture might call for something else. For example, you may want to put your message queue on another server. If you did this then you wouldn’t have access to the temporary storage that MMS2R defaults to for saving the attachments. In that case you could use a queue and put the attachments directly in the queue, on s3, etc.

Some people have reported problems using the daemons library and having their daemon just halt and stop responding. I’ve never encountered that and I’ve had this similar setup running for months. You will also want to put your mail_processor_control under some sort of process supervision, such as by monit or god.

You may be asking yourself why we didn’t use ActionMailer to handle the incoming emails since it does that? The answer is that if you do it the way it’s described, for example, on the Rails wiki, it will spin up a new Rails process for each email that’s received. Under any significant load, this will fail⁽⁵⁾. Another drawback to that approach is that if there is a failure, you lose the email. With this type of architecture, it remains in the queue and you can just process it later.

Conclusion

This is a good start to handling email in your application. Being able to process email is a great way to enhance your app and give your users mobile access. With email-capable phones becoming ubiquitous, they no longer need to be tied to a computer to use your app. Remember, an app that can be used anywhere is an app that will be used anywhere.

Citations

http://railstips.org/2008/10/27/using-gmail-with-imap-to-receive-email-in-rails
No it won’t.
http://xph.us/software/beanstalkd/
http://www.benr75.com/articles/2008/01/04/attachment_fu-now-with-local-file-fu
Because rails can’t scale. See http://canrailsscale.com for more information.

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Jason Seifer

Rails 3.0 rc2 Notes

Genius Pool Supports Twitter Integration

Mac OS X Post Install Guide, May 2010

Part 1: Update Software

System Settings

Appearance

Finder

Keyboard

Apps

Developer Stuff

Wrapping Up

Friends Around Me

Rails Envy

A Brief Bit About Me

Where Rails Envy Came From

Full Time to Contract

We Make Some Videos

Hey, Let’s Start a Podcast!

Rails Can’t Scale

Working for The Man!

Tragedy Strikes

Some Good Comes out of it

Wrapping Up

Moving On

Rake Tutorial

A Little Bit of History

It’s about Dependencies

Running Other Tasks

Namespaces

The Default Task

Describing Your Tasks

Redefining Tasks

Invoking Tasks

Refactoring

Rails

Scheduling Rake Tasks

Misc

Derivatives

Further Reading

Useful Rake Examples

Developer Job Board

80s Me

On Passwords

Rails Reminder: DATE_FORMATS

Stand Up While You Read This!

Using Concentrate for the Pomodoro Technique on OS X

The Pomodoro Technique

Setting Up Concentrate

Get To It!

8 Chrome Extensions For Web Developers (Mac too!)

Bonus Extensions

Mouse Gestures

The Dev Show Episode 1

Live blogging BizConf Day 2

Keynote

Corey Haines of coreyhaines.com

Bruno Miranda of Hoodiny Entertainment

Ian McFarland of Pivotal Labs

Jose Gonzalez of Hoodiny Entertainment

Liveblogging Bizconf

Obie Fernandez, Hashrocket

Randall Thomas, Engineyard

Jerry Weinberg of geraldmweinberg.com

Jerry Weinberg of geraldmweinberg.com

Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com

Using the Rails logger outside of models and controllers

Getting RSpec and TextMate to play nice

Microsoft deems Ruby on Rails a competitor

Receiving Email with Rails

Introduction

Configuring Your Email Server

Handling The Email

Processing the Queue

Considerations

Conclusion

Citations