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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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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Matt’s post below got me thinking about how I would accomplish the same thing in Ruby, turning an array into a string with each element separated by a comma. Here’s what I came up with.

array_of_strings = ["foo", "bar", "foobar"]
str = array_of_strings.collect{|a| a + ", "}.to_s.chop.chop
=> "foo, bar, foobar"

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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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