Samurai Coder

I just bought it.

Phusion Passenger™ dropped onto the scene in early 2008 and immediately caused quite a stir.

Many developers have hoped for a way to run Rails applications natively inside Apache, and now it’s possible! Passenger™ makes development easier and is the best way to run Rails applications on shared hosts. You may even find it so easy to use that you choose to deploy your production applications with it as well.

rubyphunk:

RSpactor is a little command line tool to automatically run your changed specs (much like autotest). As you may expect, it concentrates on the use of RSpec. It was especially designed to use filesystem events like FSEvent on Leopard (MacOS 10.5) instead of permanently polling a directory structure. RSpactor is currently only working on Mac OS 10.5. But hey: I’m very confident that the next version of RSpactor will work on Linux boxes, too.

Hexagonal Close-Packed:

To package an existing Ruby on Rails application into an executable Mac OS X desktop application. This process (and the result) requires OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) or later.

Interesting. A very detailed tutorial.

I decided to study for LPIC-1. I already have basic skills of Unix, but not so much about administrating. Also, as my background is unusual, I would like my employer and collegues to make sure what skills I already have. LPIC sounds reasonable because the knowledge is applicable to any Linux systems.

After that, I may study for Oracle Bronze, which is the lowest level in Oracle Certificates. As the lowest level, the exam doesn’t require much knowledge about Oracle-specific skills. Most of the contents are usable in MySQL. Or I may simply take MySQL exams.

In terms of programming, there’s a Ruby certificate. While this sounds promissing, I’m not really sure if it’s worth in everyday programming. The exam just seems to be asking memorization. Look at the sample questions someone else made.. Also, there’s no established book or resources available at this time. I can’t throw $150 for that sort of exam yet.

I’m not a big fan of certificates, but they will help me in some way or other.

P.S.: CompTIA seems less known here in Japan. Also there are some certificates that an organization supported by the govement offers, but they are only taken twice a year (spring and fall), I will avoid them for now.

I’m learning Rails little by little. I’m just a very entry-level developer. As my skills in other languages are scare, I’m trying to understand what it takes to build a web app in a efficient manner. Below are some of the things I keep in mind.

• DRY
• RESTful
• Skinny controller and fat models
• Less than 10 methods for one controller
• Less than 15 lines per a controller action
• ActiveRecord callbacks
• Controller filters and verification
• TextMate snippets and commands (built-in and my own)
• Better understanding of Subversion
• Git, Git and Git
• BDD with RSpec, RSpec on Rails and RSpec on Rails Matcher plugins
• Annotations with TODO, OPTIMIZE and FIXME. Use rake notes.
• Autotest and Rcov (with Growl goodness)
• Spec’ing what is needed in controllers and views
• Better understanding finder methods including things new to Rails 2.0 and 2.1.

I don’t know when I can learn to say I understand all of them above, but it’s worth always remembering to write better code. I will be trying using Apple’s wireless keyboard next week to see how my efficacy changes. (I’m now using Apple’s wired keyboad.)

Update: A few more.

• HTML validity. Always check with a Firefox plugin or Safari plugin.
• Reduce unecessary <br> tags.
• Never forget to add <label> tag.

Allan finally found time to set up scripts. It’s up.

I found the Unix command cheat very useful. You can invoke text-based cheat sheets from Terminal.

The list of all the cheatsheets is available.

Ryan Bates:

Active Record models are the foundation of every good Rails application. Learn how to get the most out of the Active Record features that you use on a day-to-day basis from a popular Rails developer and screencaster. In these screencasts, Ryan Bates incrementally builds the models for a Rails application and refactors them over time to address new features.

Screencasts from The Pragmatic Programmers. $5 per episode.

David Chelmisky:

We released RSpec-1.1.4 today. It’s mostly a maintenance release but there are a few of cool new features that you may want to know about and take advantage of.

Explanation on hash_including, heckler returns and stub_model are given.

The third edition is now in beta. The book covers Rails 2.0.

I covered Rails 2.0 and the book. You don’t have to wait for the book to come out of beta. Nothing stops us from getting started with web programming.