Increment vs Iterate
These images have been glued to my brain since I first saw them. A masterpiece by Jeff Patton that rang lots of bells. via Obie Fernandez.
General
Rails vs The 7 Frameworks
This has nothing to do with comparing 8 different frameworks. It’s just to tell the horror story of one of our down-the-drain projects. The client came with an old product that he needed to add new features to. The product does, what is best described as CRUD operations. Nothing challenging, nothing difficult. It maintains a set of data for...
Rocket Science
Obie Fernandez, the author of the now de facto Rails book, The Rails Way, have recently launched HashRocket, a Ruby on Rails consultancy with a unique business model: Your application in 3 days or your money back OK! That money-back part is of my imagination. The reason I’m writing this is the “great” message on their homepage. BUILDING A...
When your clients run your business
I just need to get something off of my chest. Some of the companies that I’ve worked for/with, rely heavily on their clients as the only true measure of performance. They would take client satisfaction as a reflection of how they themselves perceive their operations and businesses. This is just plain WRONG. Unless an organization have the established mechanisms...
On-Ruby Contest Winner
Pat Eyler from On Ruby has notified me that I won his Holiday Blogging Contest. My entry for generating a Rails site map was apparently the best Rails how-to in those posted. It won me 3 books from Apress.This is my first online win EVER, and being it a Rails-oriented win, makes it even sweeter. Thanks Pat. Thanks Apress.
Bilal Tamer Helmy Salama
As another great addition to this blog, I here introduce to you “Bilal”, our newest addition to the family. Bilal was born on the 31 December 2007, at 8:10 PM in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, at this hospital. It’s funny that Bilal was meant to come to this world on the same day (31 December) as his beautiful sister.He was...
Canada Software Developers Salary Survey
Most software development salary surveys I came across are either inaccurate, generic or obsolete. This is an individual effort to capture the pay scale of Canada’s Software Developers & Consultants. It is also an effort to highlight the wide scale of activities usually handled by professionals in the field, which sometimes goes unvalued monetarily or professionally. Results will be...
Rails Sitemap
“When something is too hard, it means that you’re not cheating enough. it means that you’re doing it wrong“. Generating a Rails sitemap (hash of application controllers and actions) is as simple as placing and calling this method in your application: 1234567891011121314 def controllers_and_actions require ‘find’ site_map = {} Find.find(RAILS_ROOT + ‘/app/controllers’) do |file_name| if /_controller.rb$/ =~ file_name name...
Rails – multi selects for associated models
Handling Multiple Selects (or multiple associated attributes) can be quite cumbersome. Ryan Bates has recently wrapped it very nicely in his Complex Forms Screencast. As per that simple way, here’s a how I handle it: Model: 1234567891011class Project < ActiveRecord::Base….has_many :assigned_taskshas_many :users, :through => :assigned_tasks….def assigned_task_attributes=(assigned_attributes)assigned_attributes.each do |attributes|assigned_tasks.build(attributes)endendend Controller:def create @project_task = ProjectTask.new(params[:project_task]) @project_task.save New/Edit Views:<%= select_tag(“project[assigned_task_attributes][][user_id]”, options_for_select(@users.collect{|u| [u.full_name,...
Blueprint-CSS
After using the CSS Framework from Content-with-style for a few years, I grew tired of how it’s structured, and how difficult it is to customize. Along came Blueprint-CSS. A great concept, and wonderful implementation. And with the new BlueprintCSS Generator plugin for Rails from Ariejan.net, how can I resist using it. I’m rolling it out in my current project...