Author Archive: Josh Symonds

Rails Performance, Code Metrics, and Locking Down your Application: Tips & Tricks from Windy City Rails 2008

Josh Symonds, Wednesday, September 24, 2008 @ 3:27 pm

Windy City Rails was the best Rails conference I've ever been to, which is easy for me to say since it was my first actual Rails conference. But even speaking from a fairly uninformed point of view I found it very full of quality. In case you didn't know, it was created by ChicagoRuby, sponsored by Pathfinder (us) among others, and you can find tons more details if you're interested at http://windycityrails.org/. Anyway, it was this last Saturday the 20th, and after four days of digestion I am prepared to deliver some of the highlights:

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Selling Git on the Business End

Josh Symonds, Thursday, August 28, 2008 @ 12:55 am

Today I gave a presentation on why Git makes sense for an agile consultancy like ours. It was more challenging than I initially imagined; there are many, many blog posts out there discussing why Git is technically superior to Subversion. But when I searched for posts discussing the business merits of Git I came up short. Git is faster, branches better, it has a local copy of the repository, it's small and cheap, but these are points that sell an engineer. What sells the administrators, the business analysts, the project managers?

I came up with a few cool scenarios to illustrate why we, as a business, should adopt Git -- essentially, why it makes not only my life easier, but why it will make the decision makers incredibly happy too. Then my colleague Jason Sendelbach and I gave a short talk on not only the why of the Git, but how we can start using it. Here I'll summarize our presentation. If you want to use Git in your company, but you have problems selling it to the administration, feel free to crib liberally. These points worked great for me.

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Getting Started with Facebooker

Josh Symonds, Wednesday, July 30, 2008 @ 3:53 pm

Developing for the Facebook platform can be a big headache, and on Rails your headaches are unfortunately compounded from the get-go. While the otherwise-inferior PHP users get an API library from the Facebook development team (I'm kidding, I love you PHP guys), on Rails we have to deal with gems that aren't even at version 1.0 yet. While Facebooker is quite good at this point, its documentation covers a rather sparse selection of its impressive feature set, and RFacebook, which is better documented, hasn't been updated in aeons and is way more difficult to use besides. And unfortunately the standard Facebooker tutorial doesn't include the newest features from the recent Facebook profile overhaul or even all the necessary steps to get a new Rails application running on Facebook. So, enter Josh.

In this blog post I'll tell you the best way to integrate Facebooker into a new Rails project so you can start developing social networking applications quickly and easily, and how to hook them in to Facebook's new profile plan. The goal is that by the end of this post you'll have a totally working Facebooker Rails application and you'll understand how to develop in it at least a little bit.

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DRYing up Rails Controllers: Polymorphic and Super Controllers

Josh Symonds, Tuesday, July 8, 2008 @ 11:48 pm

Controllers are an obvious point to find repeated behavior in an application. Identical methods across many controllers are a very common problem: consider comments, for example, where you might encounter an add_comment and remove_comment in every controller. Or think of all the controllers that render the same actions in the same way. Maybe they implement very basic CRUD functionality but have very complicated AJAXy tricks. You find yourself typing in those tricks over and over again on every controller. Let's fix that! By using a few neat techniques, we can significantly DRY up our controllers and end up with code that's not only very reusable, but very easily changeable to effect significant alterations in our application.
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Pretty blocks in Rails views

Josh Symonds, Tuesday, July 1, 2008 @ 2:27 pm

One of the easiest ways to improve the readability and reusability of a Rails application is to refactor the view layer. I find that most Rails code I look at in models and controllers tends to be very good, but views are a huge mess of single-use partials, repeated behavior, and lots and lots of missed opportunities to implement some really graceful and reusable helpers. I wanted to whomp up a quick blog post discussing some of my favorite techniques for making views prettier.

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