RubyNation is awesome. Most ruby events are awesome, but in particular I enjoy RubyNation because it's local to me. It's not that I don't like traveling to other conferences or that I think Washington DC is the best possible place for a conference. What I love about RubyNation being local is having 200+ ruby developers from my immediate locale in one single place, at one single time. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Jim Weirich and Corey Haines show...

Ruby is known for being bad at garbage collection. The truth is that the default GC settings aren't very good for a Rails application so if you run a Rails app you really should do some tuning (this requires either Ruby Enterprise or Ruby 1.9.2). Here's a streamlined process for getting started: Get a Baseline Turn on collecting GC stats for New Relic (of course you're using New Relic). You want to know what you're fixing and this will probably...

I recently tackled a pretty typical data migration task where some source model had to be transformed into some target model. About 80% of the elements were mapped field for field, and the other 20% had to be mutated in some way. Tired of writing one off rake tasks to pull and transform data, I came up with a little data mapper class that I cold reuse in the future.

Like people, applications start out small. Unlike people, applications do not always have a predictable growth pattern. Sometimes they grow really big, and sometimes not at all. When applications grow large, organization becomes important because it is no longer possible to remember every detail about your application without consulting the source code. "We use Rails, the convention tells us how to organize our code". Yes, but having 50 or more files in your app/models directory is hardly being organized.

Three Things that Work Great Together If you use Chef and Nagios, you already know what a great combination they make. As you build new servers they automatically start getting monitored by Nagios. Without you having to do anything they're grouped together based on role, so its easy to apply the same checks for all servers in a given role. If you haven't tried Nagios built with the chef cookbook its easy to get started with this guide from Opscode....

Green Screen is a build monitoring tool that is designed to be used as a dynamic Big Visible Chart (BVC) in your work area. It lets you add links to your build servers and displays the largest possible information on a monitor so that the team can see the build status from anywhere in the room. We use Green Screen at CustomInk to look after our continuous integration servers, currently 3 Hudson servers and one Jenkins cluster. We have a...

Not unlike most technology choices, the choice of which configuration management tool to use for managing your infrastructure as code is sure to spark debate among opinionated technologists. There are certainly a number of choices available all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. There are a number of things to consider as you select a tool.