Software As She’s Developed

So you're coding a partial and you want to know which template has pulled it in. The magic word is "@first_render", which will give you something like "homepage/admin" for the homepage/admin.rhtml template. Trivial, I know, but I couldn't find any mention of it after much googling, so I decided to output self.inspect and was pleased [...]

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I didn't ever expect to get excited about how a framework handles keywords, but Rails just impressed me big-time. When I tried to create a model named "Activity", Rails told me it was reserved and then came back with a list of thesaurus terms that might be used instead!. That's not just opinionated software, it's [...]

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Email and the web have traditionally been the two ubiquitous services on the internet (prior to the web, it was email and usenet). Podcasting (and vidcasting/vodcasting) is now becoming another ubiquitous service. The reason I mention this was an interesting quote on BBC news today in a story about the web's birthday. Despite the story [...]

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When people talk about their favourite benefit of Rails over framework X in language Y, they'll usually mention ActiveRecord, Ajax support, etc. But at a deeper level, the thing that really stands out is that Rails is opinonated software. This is where Rails derives its power and agility. It's pretty well-understood in software that consistency trumps [...]

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