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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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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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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I always lose this snippet of code, which will run RCov for all your controllers and models, and output the results to the /public folder of your Rails app:
>rcov test/functional/*.rb test/unit/*.rb –output=public/rcov –rails

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I recently purchased a VPS from SliceHost.com. After ruling out a shared host and deciding on a VPS setup, SliceHost seemed to offer the most for my money. My initial setup is the 256slice, which offers 256mb RAM, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of bandwidth for $20 a month. Being able to [...]

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