If you’re like me, tailing your development log might provide you with some useful information. The thing I like the most is viewing the details of the queries that happen in the background while you are using your application. But one thing that makes it harder to keep a proper view on the data that … Continue reading Turn off asset logging in your Rails application
Talking to freelancers about how to set a decent rate is like the ideal opening to start a debate. Do you charge by the hour, by day or per project? And how do you define the rate? When you charge by day, do you multiply your hourly rate times the hours you work in a … Continue reading Setting your freelance rate
Like a lot of developers, I’ve been watching the movement of MySQL since it has been acquired by Oracle. Since the acquisition, a lot of MySQL forks have been created. Think of MariaDB and Drizzle. I’ve also been looking at PostgreSQL. Since long, I’ve wanted to start personal project using PostgreSQL. So I decided to migrate … Continue reading Migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL
One of the great benefits of open source is that for some of the problems you encounter, someone probably already solved it for you. For a project I needed a simple way to parse an RSS feed. If you look around, you’ll find plenty of libraries that designed to tackle this problem. But taking a … Continue reading Parsing RSS feeds in ruby
“Release early, release often”, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of early and frequent releases in creating a tight feedback loop. I’ve been trying to push my code to production as often as possible. But I’ve been having a problem with the asset pipeline. From the moment Capistrano hits the deploy:assets:precompile task, it might take … Continue reading Faster Capistrano deployments
In my earlier post, I covered the basics of creating a ruby gem. At the end, show the release rake task to tag, build and release your gem. But you might get an error when doing this: $ rake release my_gem 0.0.1 built to pkg/my_gem-0.0.1.gem. Tag v0.0.1 has been created. rake aborted! Your rubygems.org credentials … Continue reading Easily publish your ruby gems
One of the typical fears most freelancers have or even people that want to get started, is the unknown factor of costs and income. When you start off, you probably already know what kind of products or services that you want to provide, but you get kind of stuck on the financial part. Even if … Continue reading Keep track of your cash flow
Lately I’ve been working on automating my server infrastructure. One of the tasks at hand was to simplify the way I install certain software. For instance, for my web-stack, I compile ruby and nginx manually, so I can compile them using specific parameters. When I started researching this, I got overwhelmed with all different kind … Continue reading Creating Debian packages with checkinstall
Deployments are a critical phase in any software project. I can still remember the time where I needed to deploy code changes to production using nothing more than FTP to upload all the changed files. Oh boy, the elevated heart rate, logged in on the production server to intervene when something went wrong. From time … Continue reading Deployments automation with Capistrano
In my previous post, I described how you could setup Ansible. At this point, you are able to send commands to your hosts. Although running ad hoc tasks is useful, I won’t be covering that here. If you want to know more about running command line ad hoc tasks check out the detailed examples on … Continue reading Configuration management with Ansible: Playbooks & Execution