Nobody cares what tools you use
I’ve spent almost all of my career with something along the lines of “freelancer”, “consultant”, or “contractor” on my business cards and the forms HR departments make me sign. On the two occasions that hasn’t been the case I’ve been working for as part of a development team that was primarily developing solutions for external customers, or managing a team of contractors working on launching a start-up. So I’ve been really very fortunate to work across a really broad spectrum of clients and environments and with some brilliant people, which over time makes it easier to appreciate what works and what doesn’t.
Read more on why nobody cares about the tools you use
You don't win friends with salad
Trying to work out which testing framework to use in ruby these days is simple, all the kids are using cucumber so you should too lest you want to be an outcast. It’s all very great in theory, but how much is it really helping you?
Read more on how to remove cucumber from your diet
Github-style capistrano deployments
If you’ve deployed a Rails app the chances are high that you’ve done it using Capistrano. Capistrano has come a long way, but it was originally designed back when we were all using SVN to manage our code. Times have changed, and we can make some significant improvements to the default process.
Read more on how to deploy your app using Git
Don't put your private key on a public server
There are times when you’ve SSHed onto a remote server that you need access to another server, but you don’t have your private key on the first server. You probably don’t want to put your private key on there either, because there is another way.
Read more on how to forward your SSH public key
Getting started with MongoDB
I’ve been playing with a few new database technologies lately, and the NoSQL movement seems to have come into vogue. Getting up and running with MongoDB is quick and painless, and it offers a lot of the benefits of key-value stores along with the query power of you’re used to from a RDBMS.
Managing email lists with Mailchimp and MonkeyWrench
Delivering emails is much harder than it sounds in practice. There are all sorts of hassles with being trusted by recipient servers and not being flagged as spam, thankfully Mailchimp help make it easy.
Read more about managing lists in Mailchimp with MonkeyWrench
Filtering the Twitter Streaming API
If you’ve been using the Twitter Streaming API you’ve probably noticed you get a lot of data. There’s an easy way to limit it to things you care about.
Read more about Filtering the Twitter Stream
Bash script to check timestamp on cron logfile
We’ve got a cron job that runs nightly, that broke. So time to put something in place that will check the error code and that the job has run.