The latest version of Ruby comes standard now with Comma Separated Value support built right in via the CSV
library written by one of our very own alumni, James Edward Gray II. You might know CSV as the extremely portable format file used for everything from Excel Documents, to Numbers Spreadsheets, to lists of emails, to even generic data files. The CSV library is quite generic and useful by itself, but sometimes, you really need the expanded capabilities that only an Excel or Numbers document can support. Read on to find out how to generate Excel and Numbers compatible .xlsx files with Ruby.
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Waaaayyy back in December, I had the pleasure of attending a code
retreat.
In that post, I discussed what I learned.
This month, I had the pleasure of facilitating a code
retreat a few weeks
ago. Thanks to
Highgroove, TapJoy,
FourAthens, and my co-coordinator Travis
Douce, the Athens Code Retreat was a resounding
success.
Also, a special shout out to our Code Retreat homies in South
Africa led by
Corey Haines, who handed off the baton to us late in
their day but early in ours.
Read on to find out how lessons learned from facilitating compares to attending,
how the general "You" actually means "I" in the blog title, and how many times
it takes (me) to learn the four rules of simple design.
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In case you missed it, the awesome Globay Day of
Coderetreat occurred on
December 3rd. The amount of fun I experienced was unexpected and impressive!
I learned some things too. Read on to find out what.
(Also, don't worry if you missed the code retreat, sad kitten has some good news
for you at the end of this post.)
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At rubyhoedown, the inimitable Jim Weirich gave an
awesome presentation on using the debugger in ruby. Before his new found
respect for the ruby debugger, Jim told us that puts statements worked just fine
for him.
And this is true. You can get by with puts. But, you can get by much faster
using the debugger. Read on to find out when to use the debugger and how.
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RubyConf, ahhh Rubyconf.
How was it this year you ask? To answer that question we must first address the
question:
How was my first ruby conf?
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by jonathan
Published September 21, 2011 tagged with:
Awesome
You ever worked on a beastly project? And by beastly, I mean large,
enterprisey, many fingers in the pie (3+ active rails developers), non-sexy (not
social, not using NoSQL, not using Rails 3) project?
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ActiveRecord is wonderful for the easy queries. But there are times, in the
name of performance, when one must bust through the ORM facade and dip below
into SQL.
Edit: Updated gist to fix SQL injection. Thanks to all the code reviewers, uh I mean commenters, for pointing it out!
Also pointed out in the comments, using lambdas in this pattern makes most sense for Rails 2. In Rails 3, AREL is composable so one can use class methods.
Wed Jun 29 13:55:27 EDT 2011
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He may be too humble* to admit it but Andy Lindeman, one of our new(er) hires, is awesome.
He recently did a lightning presentation on Solr and Sunspot for the Huntsville Ruby Group. See the announcement over on his blog and give him some feedback!
* We only hire the humblest programmers. It is in the company charter.
Have you heard the myth about the lone wolf programmer?
Knee deep in crushed jolt cola cans, empty latte coffee cups, and busted
keyboards (due to the incredible work rate of their owner), this paragon of
unheralded genius is an island of productivity and impressive tasks
accomplished in insanely short time spans.
The phe-nom rides under the nom-de-plume of the cowboy/girl programmer. And the cowboy/girl programmer doesn't work at Highgroove Studios.
You see, we code review.
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Highgroovers. Flexible, self-starting, curious, good, nerdy, professional.
These are a few of the words we used to describe ourselves in our annual
2010 Recap meeting (attendance optional -- we're ROWE
baby!). We are always re-examining our
best practices (a best practice - how meta!) to insure that we're delivering
maximum value to our customers.
"Delivering maximum value." That sounds lame!
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by jonathan
Published December 10, 2010 tagged with:
At Highgroove, we’re efficient. We ride our bikes to work (most of the time). We conserve our clients time, resources and file descriptors. File what?
That’s right, we conserve file descriptors.
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New albums drop on Tuesdays, why not drop some nifty knowledge as well?
Today, I had the pleasure of attending an Engine Yard webinar, Debugging
Ruby Systems. In this webinar, the always sharp Aman Gupta (twitter, github), reviewed his
favorite tools for debugging ruby and rails applications.
The webinar recording isn’t yet up and even though the slides will eventually be posted,
I figured it would be worthwhile to post my notes so here they are. For my
next post, I’ll cover which tools helped me diagnose and resolve an
outstanding issue in one of our current applications. Stay tuned!
All credit for good goes to Aman. Any errors are mine. Most of these tools are linux specific. Enjoy!
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Have you ever had a problem with rude cows in Ruby? If you have unruly class methods that need proper handling, read on.
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I recently completed my first sprint triathlon. The feeling of accomplishment
was overwhleming and I almost cried crossing the finish line. For those not
familiar, a sprint triathlon consists of a 400m swim, a sixteen mile bike ride, and
a three mile run in that order. Numerous volunteers provide water, gatorade,
directions and most importantly, moral support and kind words along the
course. I’m unable to overstate how welcome and vital words of encouragement
are. “You can do it!” “Great job! Keep it up!”.
As overlwhelmed, exhausted, accomplished, and inspired as I felt crossing the
finish line, a more inspiring moment came later, much much later. And it also
helped me answer the question “Will I compete again?”
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As relatively new parent, my oldest is about to turn five. I’ve attended enough young kids’ birthday parties to develop a standard rating system for a
successful party. My rubric is simple and effective.
- Do they serve adult beverages?
- Do they serve adult food? (burgers = good. steak = better. no food? it better be a short party)
- As an adult, do I get cake?
- What about ice cream?
Its a simple system and it has helped me plan my own kids parties.
Good projects work the same way. A simple set of guidelines, when followed, insure success. Of all project guidelines, effectively managing scope is the most important. Pivotal tracker, our agile project management software of choice, keeps us on the straight and narrow when it comes to delivering value to our clients. This point was driven home for our recent work on a client’s project.
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If you’re keen on the tongue in cheek, check out my amazing blog post about integrating facebook into a rails app.
For the short and sweet version, you can jump to the README on my github fork of facebooker2.
