lengarvey

I had lots of WiFi issues until I turned off bluetooth. Give it a go!

There's nothing stopping you from creating extra folders under /app to contain various types of service objects. Personally I have:

  /app/factories - for classes which create active record objects
  /app/services - for classes which do something I generally don't care about the return value of. Often perfect for background jobs.
  /app/decorators - most of these are Draper classes
  /app/forms - form objects

and a few others from various other gems.

You say: "Hey that must suck, is there anything I can do to help?" or if you genuinely can't figure it out ask a question about the bit you don't understand: "Let me get this right, someone stole your car and now you're late for a meeting?"

But be careful about asking questions which seem accusatory: "Did you leave your keys in your car? That would be pretty stupid"

Equivalent hypothetical statements in the realm of sexism/discrimination might be: "That sucks, is there anything I can do to help?" or if you're genuinely curious to learn more: "That sounds awful. You've raised some good points, are there any resources I can read so I can further understand?" but don't say: "You weren't wearing those hot-pants were you? That would be pretty stupid"

Ignorance my be applied equally but thanks to privilege as a male you can afford to ignore or dismiss those ignorant comments in a way that a person with less privilege may not be able to. As a male you're told by society that you're allowed to go out, break all the rules and take what you want whereas as a woman you're meant to be quiet, demure and "proper".

Bringing up alternate social injustices is generally considered a tactic of diversion. It's not that these other injustices aren't important (they are very important) but it happens with such regularity that it's considered de-railing to the conversation.

And this common refrain is the shrill cry of someone who hasn't had to manage a Ruby on Rails application. Application libraries are the domain of the developer, not operations. Your job is to give me a stable system for me to deploy on top of, not to dictate what I can and cannot deploy.

Rubygems and bundler makes updating your application stupidly easy. I blogged about it here: http://bottledup.net/2013/01/10/bundler-and-gemfile/ but if you have a good Gemfile and automated CI then all you need to do is `bundle update rails` and then deploy your code. This is at least as easy as using apt to update your stuff.

Generally a weasel apology would be:

"I'm sorry If I made someone feel bad"

Not

"I am sorry. I feel terrible that I made someone else feel terrible."

Corey's apology did feel nicer, but I don't think that Steve's was a bad apology.

Why are you thinking about this when you're not even sure that your app will need to run on multiple EC2 regions? This smells like premature optimisation to me.

No, it isn't bad advice just overly simplified and generalised.

The vast majority of companies won't need to face scaling or big data issues, they're too busy going after that next sale to keep their heads above water. There are, however, some problems that require lots of data very early on so in these situations it's appropriate to look for solutions like MongoDB, CouchDB, Riak et al. What ends up happening all too often is someone hears about MongoDB being the best new cool thing and decides to implement their company CRUD + sales platform on top of it.

The question you have to ask yourself is why isn't Postgres suitable for you. That might be huge amounts of data and heavy reads and rapidly changing schemas that make MongoDB a better choice.

In any case this post was great because it shows that Postgres can scale if you're willing to put some money, thought and effort into it. I doubt many people here have Instagram's data size or scaling issues.

I wrote a slightly different article: http://bottledup.net/2013/01/10/bundler-and-gemfile/

It focuses on Bundler and your Gemfiles so that people understand not only how to update rails, but their other gems too. Personally I don't like rvm gemsets for bundler controlled apps (like rails) and think that rvm, bundler, rubygems and so on only serve to confuse the same part-time and hobby developers.

Actually it depends on what your Gemfile looks like. If you've specified the exact version in your Gemfile you'll need to edit it before running `bundle update rails`. This means your Gemfile might look like:

    gem 'rails', '3.2.10'

Running `bundle update rails` when you've absolutely specified the version number won't do anything. Your Gemfile.lock file (which is the file that bundler uses to determine which gems to require) won't be changed. Instead of absolutely specifying the version of Rails you want to use, considering using the '~>' specifier. My Gemfile at Airtasker looks like:

    gem 'rails', '~> 3.2.8'

That means that when I run `bundle update rails` it will update the patch version of rails. Our Gemfile.lock has the following entry for rails:

    rails (3.2.11)

By using the '~>' specifier it means that we can easily update our gems patch versions without worrying about API changes between major and minor versions.

You can read: http://gembundler.com/v1.2/gemfile.html to find out more.

If you're running a relatively new version of Rails (hopefully 3.2.10) you can just goto your app on your dev machine and type:

bundle update rails

Then commit and deploy in the usual manner. You'll probably experience no issues with your application, but it's good practice to run your test suite before you do any sort of production deploy anyway.

If you're running an older version of Rails (pre bundler) or if you don't have a solid test-suite, you'll have a tougher time updating. But you definitely need to put aside time to figure it out now.

If you have an invite you're able to play in Australia. I don't own an Android but a couple of my friends are playing already. There was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the game too but I can't seem to locate the link at the moment.

One of the biggest reasons to switch is that Slim supports streaming and Haml doesn't, or at least won't until the next major version.

Sources: https://github.com/stonean/slim#slim, https://github.com/haml/haml/issues/436

There's a pretty nice transport app called TripView that replaces the horrible cityrail.info and sydneybuses.info timetabling information.

Available on Android and iPhone it's pretty much mandatory for anyone in Sydney who catches public transport.

http://www.grofsoft.com/tripview.php

Disclaimer: I have no relation with the author, I just think TripView is awesome.

He presented at the recent SydStart event/convention here in Sydney. The crowd was largely skeptical of him and his patents, and he had to cajole the audience into agreeing with him that one of his "inventions" was actually patentable.

I find it sad that a man like this is invented to speak to 900 entrepreneurs and actually given some credence. He seems like a smart guy, but patents aren't a friend of the startup community.

If you want to contact @pc0 who organised the latest SydStart event and register your displeasure at Ric being one of the main speakers at this largely awesome event that might be interesting.

Part of Rails 4.0 will be further pushing the "Russian Doll" caching that 37signals/DHH talks about here: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

One of the great things I love about Rails 3 is how easy it is to start caching. It can, and does, cause issues so make sure you're including caching in your test suite. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how Rails 4 pushes this forward.

At Airtasker (an Australian competitor) we take the approach that it'ds an open marketplace and both sides need to confirm that the task is complete before money exchanges hands. We've found it's very, very rare that the buyer will "screw over" the runner.

Also it seems much easier for us to scale up new runners than it is to get more task posters.

It's super fun working for a startup that is focused on real-world interactions. Situations like the one you describe are difficult to deal with and definitely highlight the value of good community management and customer service. It's a shame that TaskRabbit let you down. Maybe in the future if Airtasker expands to the US you can give us a try :P

Disclaimer: if it wasn't obvious I work for Airtasker.

I'd say that it's better to start off with installing vundle (https://github.com/gmarik/vundle/) and then whenever you feel like you're having problems doing something like file/buffer navigation, auto-completion or making vim pretty then go out looking specifically for something you like and vunlde will make it really easy to install just by pointing at the github.

Whatever you do, don't install syntastic unless you want your vim to run awfully slow.

In slight defense of that horrible password practice:

You can't really do much with a realestate.com.au account unless you are an Agent (which is a separate account). There's no payment processing, or any way to add content to the site. The accounts there are basically just a way to save common realestate searches as far as I can tell.

From which ISP?

The quality fluctuates wildly. If its $60 unlimited from a good ISP like iinet then it's a good deal, if it's with TPG or Dodo then it's not worth the hassle.

This doesn't stop lots of people getting some really cool stuff done. Everyone who has completed something cool presents on the Sunday evening and it's awesome.

Generally it's a really well balanced mix of hacking, gaming, socialising and optionally drinking.

I read that point more as: "You end up being like the people you hang out with". So if you want to be a successful programmer, hang out with other successful programmers. If you want to be a successful businessperson hang out with other successful businesspeople.

It's just a different way of saying: Your network matters and is way more important than most geeks would like to think.

This is measurably untrue. In Australia, for example, the level of playback, or time-shift, viewing is a very low, but increasing, percentage of total TV. Here in Australia we measure using an audio-signature match to track every minute of the day for television watched in the Nielsen panels. In the US, it is my understanding, that they actually track the commercials watched by way of a code inserted by the broadcasters into the commercial stream. Anyone skipping over the commercials would obviously not contribute to the ratings in such a system.

Television advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. Advertisers are extremely savvy, knowledgeable and are armed with plenty of statistically relevant data that proves that their advertising money isn't wasted.

In chrome you can easily view the current source by opening the elements section of Developer Tools.

I remember sitting with Chris at a SydJS meetup nearly a year ago and overhearing his plans for minefold. At the time they'd already written a bunch of code but were still very much in "stealth mode". At the time I was blown away by how much thought they'd put into the idea and have eagerly followed the development of it since.