Motivation: SD News is a “social news site” (basically a Hacker News clone), written in Rails, that I work on as part of my efforts with a Christian publishing company I run with some friends.  As part of the administrative backend, I wanted to be able to send posts to our Twitter profile.  The site [...]

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I recently picked up a copy of The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development (Pragmatic Life). I read it over the course of a week and wanted to share some of my thoughts. Chad Fowler co-authored the book Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide (Facets of Ruby) and is a huge [...]

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The Django project just announced that v1.1 is ready! Go here for the full release notes. Some notable changes include support for aggregate functions from within the ORM. This includes COUNT(), MAX(), MIN(), etc. Also, the concept of “unmanaged” models which allow you to easily support tables that pre-existed or were created by some other [...]

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DISCLOSURE: I was sent this sample chapter by the publisher. I’m sure some of you folks will find it useful so I’m posting it. For a review of the book go here. Download Sample Chapter 6 “Serving Multiple Templates”

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Motivation: For a side project I am working on, I wanted to be able to send a trackback to WordPress blogs (or any blog with an XMLRPC endpoint), using PHP.   Simple enough. Methodology: I had a few different options.  I could have manually made a POST request to the endpoint, hand-coding the XML (this brute [...]

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