When you are developing an app or a website for your client, it is pretty common to setup a sandbox environment where your client can test and see the application while it is still in development. One thing I find useful is to display the last deployment date on the home page. Here is a […]

Hello there, I’m sorry for not updating my blog more often. Now is the time to use the best excuse in the world that will make me look like a busy businessman and you will all be impressed. Here we go : I don’t have the time! I know a lot of you are using […]

First of all, I’d like to deny the rumor that I am dead. I’m struggling since day #1 to find a good code editor for ruby. Mac users are happy with their textmate… but what’s left for us linux users? I tried gedit, vim, scribes and eclipse (with the aptana plugin) but wasn’t happy enough […]

Pretty easy stuff today, but this is not something you may need to do often so maybe you don’t know how to do it. Say I have these 2 arrays : colors1 = [:blue, :red, :green, :orange, :purple] colors2 = [:yellow, :cyan, :green, :blue, :purple] Now what if I want a new array that contains […]

has_many :through limitations

acts_as_state_machine is a great plugin really useful when you want to add constraints and behavior to your model objects. Note : Those who don’t know what this plugin is all about should stop reading right there or risk being completely lost. One thing that seems impossible to do with the plugin is to have variable […]

I used to be a fan of the has_finder gem written by Nick Kallen. Now with Rails 2.1, this functionnality is built-in so you don’t need to install the gem. The named_scope method allows you to add finders to any model. A code snippet is worth 10000 words : class Story < ActiveRecord::Base named_scope :hilarious, […]

It’s been a while since the last edition of Rubyize this. I have waited all this time because I like when people become impatient. I have received 254 939 emails from desperate people asking me : “When will you post your 5th edition?”, “Is it hard to be that excellent?”, “You rock Frank. Warm kisses… […]

The 3rd edition marked the beginning of a new association between Rubyize this and RefactorMyCode. I did things in a rather clumsy manner, telling people about how cool RmC was while asking them to use pastie to submit their refactored version of the code. At that time I didn’t realize that RmC and Rubyize this […]

It’s time for another phenomenal edition of the fantastic Rubyize this serie (how humble is that?) But before we go any further, I’d like to briefly talk about a brand new web 2.0 rails app that has been developed by Marc-André Cournoyer, a Ruby/Rails guru from Montreal. The app is called RefactorMyCode and became instantly […]