Hacking Live Systems
After my evening jog, I hopped onto the QA environment around 11pm because I wanted to look something up for another blog post I was writing. Instead of being greeted with the welcome screen of the app, I get redirected to our homepage. All kinds of warning flags were going off in my head, but I couldn't collect my thoughts because of the runner high. Did I break something before I left work? Did I forget to deploy the latest code base to QA? Were we going to lose a night of quality QA from the team in India?
Where to Find Things in Rails
When I started learning Rails, I was amazed when all kinds of magical things started working. The problem was that I never felt in control of the magic. If I wanted a specific kind of magic to occur, then Google would route me to an extremely unfriendly and near worthless Ruby on Rails wiki. I often had to guess how things work by tweaking code found on peoples' blogs or by trial and error after not understanding the Rails API documentation. Nowadays, I'm very comfortable with getting around in Rails and all it's plugins. Here's how I go about hunting down a problem.
Coupa and Rails 2
Joy and churchbells this morning here in sunny San Mateo! David smacked down Rails 1.2.3 with a heavy hand and replaced it with the newer and shinier Rails 2.1.1. Here's what's rocking and not-so-rocking with the upgrade.
Week of Insomnia
Contrary to what you might think, I think insomnia's fantastic. It puts me in this limbo state where my mind feels like lead and I suck at almost everything. One thing I've found myself to be quite good at is catching up on Internet. There was plenty of crap, but I found a lot of good technical stuff.
Mini-apps Galore!
I'm warming up to the idea of using small webapps that do less. Instead of full blown behemoth applications that take a lot of time to learn and configure, they're more in the spirit of Unix tools or perl one-liners. Here's three that I came across that show quite a bit of promise.