November 2012

Thoughts on building vs growing

Many times I’ve heard professionals talk and plan out building software applications. Great ideas they’d like seen implemented, and how it could make things better. Though might not seem obvious – software applications, at least the good, are never built. Applications are grown.[1] There’s quite the range of differences between building an application and growing one, but I’ll focus...

Rails and inner query choices

Consider that we have two models; Well and SurveryPoints . A Well represent an oil/gas/water well, each with multiple SurveyPoints. A SurveyPoint represent the well’s coordinate at a certain depth. class Well < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :survey_pointsendclass SurveyPoint < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :wellend Say, we’d like to implement a filtration mechanism that allows us to query the wells – and for...

JRuby – can’t convert Hash into String

I’ve recently upgraded a JRuby/Rails application from JRuby 1.6.3 (1.8 compatibility mode) to 1.6.8 (1.9 mode). Everything was working out fine except for actions relying on internal CSV library (FasterCSV in 1.8 mode). The error “ was thrown as CSV tries to generate the csv string. This had the hallmarks that the application was still under the 1.8 mode...