Matthew Lang // My Programming Journal

Snippets #116

Good to see that I can now have a little bit of the Rails community on my work desktop everyday.

NorthScale Unleashes Membase Server - Another NoSQL offering, this time from the creators of memcached.
Advanced Capistrano usage - 5 recipes to help ease the pain of application deployment and maintenance.
Sprinkle - If you're in the habit of setting up virtual machines and application stacks, Sprinkle could help you automate the process.

Congratulations to the Sinatra team on the release of 1.0. Great to see this DSL reaching a milestone!

Rails and the Enterprise - In my opinion, Rails is ready for the enterprise. It's mature, stable and open source. Perhaps we just need to see more success stories of Rails in the enterprise like these mentioned by Matt.
Setting up a Rails Server and Deploying with Capistrano on Fedora from Scratch - Even though we have great platforms such as Heroku, deploying with Capistrano should be a part of any Rails developer's tool belt.
A Short Guide To Open-Source and Similar Licenses - Nice quick overview of the more popular open source licenses.
Ruby Version Manager Screencast - Teach Me To Code has new screencast on working with different development environments with RVM.

Twizzle Your Deplizzles - Great little script for updating a Twitter account with information on your latest release.
Generic Actions in Rails 3 - Rails 3 gets a new feature courtesy of Django. I love how features trickle across open source frameworks over time.
Creating a custom rake task - A great article to check out if your using Heroku to host your application.
Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks - Is 2010 going to be the year of NoSQL?
Edging your way towards Ruby 1.9.1 and Rails 3.0pre - If you haven't made the jump to Ruby 1.9.x then this is a good place to start.

I'm downing tools for the holiday season, so this will be the last post for the next couple of weeks, but normal posts will return in the New Year.

Happy holidays and all the best for the New Year!

What does Quality mean to you? - Obie Fernandez wants to know how you define quality and craftsmanship in software.
Annotate 2.4.0 released - I didn't know that annotate had that many options.
Agile scalability at Engine Yard - Sarah Allen's notes from an Engine Yard Roadshow. Agile deployment sounds like fun!

Ruby community survey - Thoughtbot are doing an end of year survey on how developers coding practices. If you've got 5 minutes, fill it out.
Debugging Rule #1: It's your fault! - Applications only do what they're told to do, so it's pointless trying to prove otherwise. I hope there's more of these soon!
Top 15+ Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code - I tend to avoid these posts as I'm quite happy with my coding practices. Read this if your new to programming in general or you want a quick refresher.
Production Rails Tuning with Passenger: PassengerMaxProcesses - Awesome guide to getting the most out of Passenger on your application server.
LinkedIn Gem for Web App - Quick guide to authenticating a user in a controller using the LinkedIn gem. Lots of potential for this gem in the right application.