I finally got around to setting up a more sophisticated deployment system for some of my apps. These apps include some built on a custom PHP framework and others that are Python / Django apps. I figured I’d share my experience…
Why is a high-level deployment infrastructure important? Deployment is something that should [...]

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Send this to your significant other/parent/relative/friend so, instead of that sweater, you get one of these nuggets of awesome this Christmas.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Write better, cleaner, more maintainable code. Learn how to manage your projects and focus on shipping your product. With insight that covers the gamut of software development [...]

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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 like Python. I like Ruby. I like C, C++, and Objective-C. I like Java. I also (actually) like PHP. I like programming – get it? Use whatever gets the job done and done well. Use whatever achieves the performance and scalability you require for a given task. [...]

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What exactly are they using it for? Front-end?

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I’ve spent more time with Django the past couple days. Read my installation guide and my first impressions to get caught up. I wanted to address a couple issues I came across as I was exposed to certain architectural designs of Django.
It might be helpful to note which books available today cover Django [...]

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I’ve been using Phusion Passenger for a few months now and I’m really pleased with it.  The performace vs. Mongrel is better, but what makes it so useful is the ease of deployment.  Being able to setup a vhost in Apache just like you would for a PHP application was very appealing to me.  Having [...]

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Recently I worked on a project where the Rails logs were filling up way too quickly. Even though we had log rotation implemented, disk space was filling up fast. As a short term solution, we wanted to suppress all SQL logging Rails. Here’s what I did.

#place this in environment.rb
class ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::OracleAdapter
def [...]

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Flickr is one of my favorite web applications. Often times, instead of building a photo uploading utility for small web sites I am working on, I will simply integrate the clients’ Flickr account into their website, using RSS and the Flickr API. Here’s how I do it.
Get the RSS Feed

require ‘rss’
require ‘net/http’
require ‘rexml/document’

@flickr_rss [...]

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Came up with this snippet while writing a Rails log file parser. It will take any number of seconds and convert it to Xm Xs format (which was useful for my display purposes):

def convert_seconds_to_time(seconds)
total_minutes = seconds / 1.minutes
seconds_in_last_minute = seconds – total_minutes.minutes.seconds
"#{total_minutes}m #{seconds_in_last_minute}s"
end

convert_seconds_to_time(630)
=>”10m 30s”
I didn’t [...]

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