More than two years ago, I joined flinc as a Rails developer. During this time, I helped building, launching and maintaining the realtime ride sharing network. From april on, I'm going to work as a freelance software engineer. It's not totally new for me, but it's the first time it'll be my main source of income.

Besides doing freelance software development work, I'm planning to focus more on my...

Like any other build process, deploying Rails applications should be a quick and easy task. You should be able to deploy everything to your server with just one command. There are several tools available for this task. One of them is Capistrano, which is probably the oldest and by far the most popular deployment tool in the Rails community. Unfortunately the documentation is still not great and...

Sometimes, when testing your code with RSpec, you'll notice similarities and duplication between your spec files. Most of these will involve setup that doesn't say much about the object under test. There's something that helps you to reduce this duplication: Custom example groups! RSpec itself (rspec-rails) uses example groups for the different types of tests for models, controllers, helpers and...

Today’s my first day as a full-time employee at flinc where I’ll mainly be doing Ruby on Rails development. I got in contact with Michael a few months back when he joined the Web Development Fulda group on Xing. We met at the meetup in september and a few days later he invited me to their offices in Dieburg. I was impressed by their product and the spirit of the team, so I agreed on doing trial work for a week. Obviously they liked me and my work and offered me a job.

During the last couple weeks I've been playing around with the iPad and Mobile Safari. I built a little tool to familiarize myself with the Multitouch JavaScript API provided by Mobile Safari as well as web applications for the iPad in general. I named the result Multitouch Inspector because that's what it does: Inspect the TouchEvents fired by the JavaScript API. ;-) Today I decided to rewrite the tool to drop the dependency on Prototype.js and I published it on GitHub.

When testing helper methods that use Rails' output buffer (for example by calling concat) with RSpec, be sure to add this to your specs:

before (:each) do 
  helper.output_buffer = ""
end

Took me a while to figure this one out. Apparently RSpec doesn't initialize the output buffer and you end up with a NoMethodError on nil.

I'm currently building a tool to help managing severals servers simultaneously for Softvision Media. As I decided to write the tool in Ruby, I've been looking for a framework to create command-line executables. On GitHub I stumbled over commander by TJ Holowaychuk of VisionMedia that provides a simple DSL for this task. It integrates with OptionParser and the Highline gem for user interaction. It...

Yesterday I decided to give Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails a try and installed it. It was dead simple to set it up and to deploy rails applications with it. I'm now using it for several “small” applications, for which the whole overhead of setting up a cluster of mongrels and a proxy doesn't seem to be adequate. I'll give you a short summary on how to install mod_rails for apache2 on Debian Etch...

News

I try to keep up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, even if I’m not working with one of them at the moment. These are the three feeds helping me to get the latest news:

:http://planetrubyonrails.com

PlanetRubyOnRails.com, not to be mixed up with PlanetRubyOnRails.**org**, is a simple feed aggregator with a set of quite informative blogs. Including the official Riding Rails Blog, Ruby Inside, and...

Script.aculo.us includes a nice effect called Effect.DropOut, which let's the element fall in an “invisible trap” underneath. Surprisingly there isn't an opposite effect. Calling Effect.DropOut with Effect.Transitions.reverse as transition, doesn’t work either. So what to do? Effect.Emerge to the rescue!

Effect.Emerge = function(element) {
  element = $(element);
  var oldStyle =...