This is my personal Git cheat sheet. It is really a mish-mosh of other resources across the web. Yep, there are a million of them. This one isn’t special, but it is useful to me. If it works for you too, awesome; if not, move on. create a remote branch from master git checkout -b [...]

The debate between developers and DBAs regarding the use of stored procedures is an old one. Most developers I know would rather not use a stored procedure unless absolutely necessary. Don’t get me wrong, when every last bit of code has been optimized and that highly transactional or trafficked portion of your application is still [...]

I realize that there are certain things I took for granted back home since moving to the Bay area. One of these things is Giordano’s pizza. Hands down the best stuffed pizza anywhere. A truckload of cheese, spinach, delicious sauce, and a crusty buttery pie-like crust == heaven. Rumor has it there a some places [...]

By now you’ve at least heard about Chef or perhaps you’ve thought about evaluating it. If you haven’t heard about Chef, no worries, let me explain. Chef is an open source infrastructure automation framework written in Ruby by the guys at OpsCode for developers. In my opinion, OpsCode has hit a grand slam home run [...]

I find myself infinitely fascinated by the increasing number of dynamic languages. For many of us dynamic language introduction came by way of Ruby, Python, and/or Javascript. While my fascination with these languages hasn’t ended, I am more enthralled with dynamic languages whose strength is concurrency and multi-threading. Indeed, these are exciting times and there is a shift happening in the software community. Honestly, who hasn’t bragged on Twitter that they just finished reading the latest book on Clojure, or Erlang? Clearly there is momentum and change in the air. The future of software and computing in the next 10 or 15 years is being shaped and molded with the underlying fundamentals and principles of these languages.

I recently had to figure out a good way to export data in XML form from a SQL Server database. I searched high and low for a good ActiveRecord adapter written in pure Ruby to talk to SQL Server. Unfortunately, the setup and overhead to get the right ODBC driver, DSN configs, and all those [...]

This past week I’ve had the opportunity to really dig in and give processing.js a work out. For those not familiar with the technology, processing.js is a JavaScript library based on the Java based processing library available for download at http://dev.processing.org/. Processing.js uses the HTML5 Canvas element to draw shapes and designs while using a [...]

Rails upgrade notes: 1.) Rails now has seeding functionality and along with it comes a new task, db:seed. If you use the seed_fu gem be aware that your db:seed call that worked with the gem is now executing the Rails version of db:seed. You will need to call rake db:seed_fu to get the gem version [...]

It is becoming increasingly popular to mix technologies, frameworks, and languages to power a web site. So what happens when you want to share session data between some permutation of a Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python, Java web framework? Well of course using cookies is the first thing that should pop into your head, and with [...]