New Year, New start. Hello CitySafe

Posted by martin

As of January this year I'm pleased to announce I will be working with the team at CitySafe.

CitySafe build tools to help emergency responders collaborate and communicate. These include mission critical apps in use daily by the Police, Government, and high profile financial and retail institutions. It's predominately Ruby (on Rails) based so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

For those of you wondering about Working With Rails.... This remains under ownership of DSC and I have passed all the day to day running over to colleagues there. Prior to my departure I ensured that the Hackfests would continue up until March. Much thanks goes to Josette @ O'Reilly for the RailsConf ticket prizes.

All in all WWR has been an amazing project. I'm so pleased to have created it and see it grow from strength to strength benefiting the community so greatly. Many thanks to everyone who uses the site and contributed in some way over the past year. It has been fantastic to have your input and feedback.

I've heard many success stories from developers starting user groups as a result of finding each other on WWR, to getting a job through recommendations, collaborating on projects or helping to get Rails adopted in their workplace. Not forgetting to mention the numerous prizes given away through the regular Hackfests.

I hope it has benefited you in some way and continues to do so. Thanks everyone!

Stay tuned...

Continue to keep up with my news via this blog (rss) and via Twitter

Mephisto gets a core team

Posted by martin

Good news for Mephisto users. The core team has been decided and the ideas for the 1.0 release are being finalised.

Interestingly enough there may also be a push to switch over to using Git which is gaining a bit of traction in the Rails community. I'm an avid user of SVK and gave Git a try a while back but stopped short after hearing tales of woe with git-svn... I may revisit at some point.

"script/generate undo" plugin released

Posted by martin

Grab it while it's hot:

 script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/beyondthetype/undo_generator_plugin/trunk

Key Features

  • Undo any generator command
  • Keeps a log of all generator history in log/generator.log
  • Prompts before undo'ing any commands
  • Even works when you bail out of a generator command part way through

script/generate undo

Posted by martin

Here is small idea I've had for sometime that I quickly knocked up yesterday.

Generators are great but we have all had those "Oops!" moments where you realised that what you created was not quite what you wanted to do. Enter script/generate undo....

script/generate model WrongName
      exists  app/models/
      exists  test/unit/
      exists  test/fixtures/
      create  app/models/wrong_name.rb
      create  test/unit/wrong_name_test.rb
      create  test/fixtures/wrong_names.yml
      exists  db/migrate
      create  db/migrate/001_create_wrong_names.rb

.. ....

oops.. didn't want to do that.

script/generate undo
Undo'ing: model WrongName
    notempty  db/migrate
    notempty  db
          rm  db/migrate/001_create_wrong_names.rb
          rm  test/fixtures/wrong_names.yml
          rm  test/unit/wrong_name_test.rb
          rm  app/models/wrong_name.rb
    notempty  test/fixtures
    notempty  test
    notempty  test/unit
    notempty  test
    notempty  app/models
    notempty  app

Under the hood all it is doing is keeping a log of your generator history (see /log/generator.log). When undo is called it looks at the last log entry and passes it onto script/destroy. Pretty simple stuff but it saves you having to remember what it was that you typed previously.

The patch as it stands is pretty rough and ready. I'm posting this here to get some feedback to gauge whether it's worth pursuing further.

UPDATE Plugin on the way. I've created a new project on Rubyforge for any plugins I make - it should be setup soon. (just waiting for approval)

UPDATE 2: Plugin now released. See this post

Quote of the day - DHH on designers

Posted by martin

"Now there is dynamic real pieces of data. They don't have to use Lorem Ipsum to fill it up with crap."

DHH on designers using Rails view templates from the Scott Hanselman podcast

Nice podcast. Some great material in there.

RailsConf 2007 done and dusted - in pics and video

Posted by martin

RailsConf 2007 was great. Lots of fun meeting loads of great peeps. Here is just a selection of the best bits from the conference:

Video

RailsConf 2007 Highlights

I'ma Noob" song at railsconf 2007

Note: Both the above vids have been sourced from YouTube

And the rest of the vids - the majority of which seem to be the marching band from camera phones.

Flickr Photo Sets

I didn't take that many photos in the end but many others did. Here are a few choice picks: (you might spot me in one or two even)


Photos by Robby Russell


Photos by Obie Fernandez


Photos by James Duncan Davidson



Slide shows created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.


And the rest...

Conference talk slides

Get the RailsConf 2007 slides from the O'Reilly site

Rails Podcast: RailsConf 2007 interviews

Download: MP3 21.9 MB | MP4 21.9 MB

More podcasts...

Parties

A special thanks to Pivotal Labs, ThoughtWorks, and Rails Machine for hosting some great evening parties. They made sure that the beer kept on flowing!

UK Attendance

A fair selection of folks jetted across to attend. Namely:

James Adams, Murray Steele, Dan Webb, Graeme Mathieson, Matt Huddie, and James Andrews

Both Dan and James gave top notch presentations at the event.

Finally

Thanks to Chad and the rest of the team for making it all possible.

A big shout out to every one that I met out in Portland. It was a pleasure. Roll on RailsConf Europe!

Keeping up with the Rails feeds

Posted by martin

I read with great interest Geoffrey Grosenbach's recent article on how he gets his Rails news

I too ditched my feed reader some time ago in favor of aggregation/news sites such as Ruby Inside and PlanetRubyOnRails. They help get me my daily dosage of what is going on in the Rails World.

I now have a third additional source. It has become such a handy resource I have put it live on the Working With Rails site. The WWR BlogSphere.

It basically gives you an aggregate view of Rails blog posts with a bias using metrics collected at WWR. So you can view the latest posts by the most authoritative or popular people. Or if you want to keep up with what is happening in the Rails source code you can follow by contributors. Even nicer if you have made recommendations you view only posts by these people - handy to make sure you are up to date with their latest developments.

I have plenty of ideas for enhancing the functionality and interface. I also welcome any suggestions or ideas. If you get a moment please do drop me some feedback - it's all much appreciated.

Signing out at the airport (waiting for my flight to RailsConf)

Martin.

Presentation from Mondays LRUG talk now online

Posted by martin

I had fun presenting on Monday at the LRUG meeting giving a talk on Distributed Ruby (on Rails)

I have put my presentation online - view it at Slide Share

If you are thinking about doing distributed ruby/rails it's worth checking out. Plenty of links to resources and more.

Talking about distributed Ruby at LRUG tonight

Posted by martin

Just a quick note to say that I'll be giving a talk at tonight's London Ruby Users group on distributed Ruby (and Rails.

More details on the event here

Twitter Sorry?

Posted by martin

Get the wrong URL in twitter? Gotta love the error page:

Twitter Sorry