This past weekend was the third installment of Ruby For Good. As clichéd as it sounds, this was the best one yet! The conference was held at the picturesque Smithsonian George Mason School of Conservation. Get ready for lots of photos!

I've been using Atom for a while now, and I thought I'd write a blog post describing some quick ways to modify Atom to work better for you. GitHub describes Atom as "modern, approachable, yet hackable to the core". This post will focus mostly on the "approachable" side of customizing your editor. We'll first look at editor and package settings before moving to configuration files you can modify, with a few small examples of how you can use them. NOTE:...

Today we're releasing a backport gem of a new feature in Rails 5—cache keys for ActiveRecord collections. It tracks fairly closely with the implementation seen in the Rails source but has a few minor differences arising from support back to AR 3. We've certainly been missing this feature for a long time and hope it comes in handy.

Two guys are walking thru the woods when they see a charging Grizzly Bear. First guy says "Run for it!" Second guy says, "You can't outrun a Grizzly!" First guy says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU." This past Fall, Hurricane Joaquin was threatening to hit the East Coast. Many models had Northern Va (also known as US East-1) in its crosshairs. The Derecho of 2012 showed that AWS Regions are vulnerable to...

Work on the Ruby SQL Server stack often requires long build times. Dependencies need to be downloaded, native extensions built, followed by long test runs to remote services. One feature I have come to rely on with Appveyor are their rolling builds - where commits to the same branch cancel previous running builds. Though Appveyor is great for Windows builds, my 💖 belongs to TravisCI. They are my goto for continuous integration due to their GitHub integration and open source...

Rails has never played nice with using multiple databases. While it is very easy to go and set up a new connection via ActiveRecord.establish_connection, the niceties that rails provides just don't exist for your second database. Fixtures don't work without explicitly calling set_fixture_class and you do not have access to any of the database tasks or generators that are provided by rails. To help alleviate this pain point for us at CustomInk, Karle Durante wrote SecondBase five years ago to...

This is an exciting time in the Ruby Community. We are welcoming many new developers from bootcamps and online code schools. We need more developers. We want to hire more developers. We want to hire you.