Hiring!
Well, I’ve put this off for as long as I could, but I think now is the time to make my first hire. I’m busy enough with client work and with my own projects that I need some help. So, if you or someone you know is looking for a part-time Rails job...
Interested in Building a Shopify App?
In case you haven’t seen it yet, Shopify has a brilliant developer platform that makes it easy for developers to create Shopify add-ons that can be marketed to Shopify store owners. And now, for even more awesomeness, there’s the Shopify App Rails Kit that makes it incredibly easy to build an app to run...
3 years of freelancing fun
I realized a couple of days ago that it was January of 2007 when I dove into the crazy world of freelancing full-time. It has been quite an adventure. In that time I’ve worked on a number of fun projects with an amazing assortment of awesome clients, launched two different products (Catch the...
Holiday Projects
For some reason I find myself starting new projects on holidays. Perhaps it’s mental decompression, or just an excuse to have some fun. Either way, today’s holiday project was a little smaller than usual—I’m already done!
It’s a tiny Sinatra app for allowing people to anonymously submit tickets to your Unfuddle account....
Quick Tip: MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound
If you’d like to get a 404 response when you encounter a MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound error, which is the default response for ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, simply toss this in your initializer where you set up your Mongo connection (I use config/initializers/mongo.rb):
ActionController::Base.rescue_responses[‘MongoMapper::DocumentNotFound’] = :not_found
Want to go to RubyConf?
If you’d like to go to RubyConf next week, but you don’t have a ticket, you’re in luck! Sadly, I can’t go, so I have a ticket available for sale for $250. Drop me a line at ben at this domain if you’re interested.
Update: Sold!
An EngineYard Cloud Gotcha
I’m still loving the EngineYard Cloud for my client deployments. I encountered one snag today, though, when cloning an environment for staging: Custom chef recipes do not get cloned along with the rest of the environment.
This means that if you have uplaoded/deployed custom chef recipes for, say, a production environment, and then you...
A Chef recipe for ProFTPD
I needed to deploy an anonymous FTP server, and of course I wanted to do it using Chef, so I went looking for a Chef recipe to install ProFTPD. Sadly, the lazyweb failed me. So, I did some actual work so the lazyweb won’t fail you. :)
Here is the commit that adds a...
Sphinx, Chef and EY Cloud
I’m getting a client up and running on EngineYard’s Cloud offering, and it has been a pleasure. One of the things I’ve appreciated about using it is that I’m forced (in a good way) to use Chef, which is awesome.
Today I was ready to deploy a new version of the app with search using...
Paperclip and MongoMapper
I started a new project recently that deals with a lot of imported data, so it seemed like a good excuse to try out MongoDB and MongoMapper. The imported data also has a associated images, so I wanted to get the Paperclip plugin working with my Mongo-based models. Fortunately for me, it actually...
Automating ec2 deployments with Ruby
Recently I’ve had a couple of clients choose Amazon EC2 for their deployment environments, so I’ve been spending more time playing with EC2 lately than I ever had before. I set out to create a repeatable and time-efficient deployment process, and the result of my work is an easy to use ruby script, detailed...
Rails plugin directory revamp
A lot has happened to the world of Ruby on Rails since the Rails plugin directory first launched back in 2005, and I have finally caught up. :) Of course I’ve been making changes all along the way, but today I’m launching a rewrite that makes the plugin directory current on all the latest...
