Tired of having no choice but to add aliases for localhost to /etc/hosts every time you work on a site that uses subdomains? Me too. That’s why I grabbed smackaho.st and made it a localhost wildcard, pointing *.smackaho.st at 127.0.0.1. If you’re a Rails developer, try visiting http://dontmakeme.smackaho.st:3000/.
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Hashrocket
Smack a Ho.st
Episode IV: A New Pope
I’ve moved my blog to Jekyll. I think this is the post where I’m supposed to apologize for falling off the blog wagon and promise to post more in the future, though truth be told I have few regrets and make no promises. My aged Drupal install had gotten to the point where I...
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Ensure With Explicit Return
Quick! What does the following method do when thing.method_that_might_raise! raises SomeAppException? And why is this a code smell?1 def some_method
2 thing.method_that_might_raise!
3 ensure
4 return thing
5 endBefore giving the answers to these two questions, let’s go over what ensure does.
The ensure clause in Ruby is...
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You Say Tomato
I say Pomodoro!After a significant amount of time and effort and the gracious help of several contributors, I’m proud to officially announce tomatoi.st.For those in a hurrytomatoi.st is a simple timer application that helps you implement the Pomodoro Technique. You should totally use it.The StoryWhile pairing with Corey Grusden a few months ago, we...
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Given Due Consideration
Or: Just Say No to CukesAs alluded to by veez, the undercurrent from some of us at Hashrocket has been decidedly anti-cucumber. Here’s my brief littany:A well developed cucumber suite is invariably slow to runFor me, at least, it makes development feel slower (this is almost certainly perceptual, but that doesn’t mean it’s not...
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Twiki
While pairing with @wesgibbs on a project at hashrocket, we got in the habbit of ‘testing’ our migrations by doing the following:
rake db:migrate db:migrate:redo db:test:prepareAt some point; frazzled and dealing with a migration that kept breaking while running the above, I uttered: “db-db-db”, which was subsequently flipped around to “bidi-bidi-bidi”....
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Pair Programming & git & github & Gravatar & You & You

Or, how Hashrocket displays pair programming gravatars on github.The Peculiar Problem of Pairs
At Hashrocket, we pair program all the time. We also use git exclusively for source control. This presents a problem: git only supports one “commiter,” but we’d like to give credit to both developers. Here’s how we hacked it.Author vs. CommitterFirst,...
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BizConf Venue Teaser
BizConf Venue Teaser from Hashrocket on Vimeo
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Pairing With Hitch

Pair programming does present some unique problems, one that we encountered at Hashrocket was commit attribution: a commit message would be identified with one member of the pair only. This is not exactly tragic, but from the perspective of a passioniate developer, having commit credit (and accountability) is a critical and visible part...
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On my first tattoo

Some people have asked why I've got a Hashrocket tattoo on my calf. The reasons are pretty biographical; 'ware ye the history contained herein. Credit for the photo goes to Travis Schmeisser.Each Wednesday Hashrocket has a midweek get-together called Hashrocket Hot Hackers Hump Day Happy Hour (or 6H). It was a...
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