ajax analysis api apple apps atom automator backpack blogging blogs browsers camping capistrano cheatsheets code console deadline design editors ergonomics events fluid fowa games gems geocoding geolocation git gitlondon google graphs helipad hpricot internationalisation iphone javascript lies littlebigplanet london mac maps marketing miniapps money optimisation patterns performance personal photography php plugins privacy productivity programming projects prototype rails rapidrails rsi rss ruby server shoes sms snippets software ssb standards sysadmin terminal testing textile textmate theory thoughts tips tools vim web workshops writing xslt
Rails boot up time really starts to drag when you’re working in a TDD or BDD style. There’s projects out there that create long running distributed processes to ease this, but it’s interesting to look at exactly why Rails might boot up slowly.
I have a project that isn’t massively complicated, but it has suffered from “just add” culture. I’ve been told to “just add” Excel support, PDF generation, and a lot more features that require complex libraries. This naturally increases the memory footprint of my application, and it also increases boot time.
Before I started my analysis, the boot…
I wrote a series last year called “Rapid Rails”. It was all about making your Rails app and development process faster. I’ve been analysing the performance of some mature Rails projects recently, so rapid rails is back.
If I’m tasked with improving an application’s performance, the first thing I look at is indexes. Indexes are something you’re told are important when you learn about relational databases, but the effort of domain modeling usually makes most people forget all about them. That means you’ll often come across a slow project that can be improved just by adding indexes.
Rail…
Welcome to Rapid Rails Part 3: Desktop mastery, the third article in my series focussing on making Rails (and yourself) faster.
A good programmer recognises when to reuse and therefore reduce code. A great programmer applies this tendency to their own workflow. Whether you use an IDE or text editor, working with Rails can be made more pleasant and efficient by observing commonly performed tasks and simplifying them.
The examples given below have a heavy bias toward TextMate, Vim and Mac OS. If you work in Windows or Linux, at the very least consider the following 10 ideas.
This is part 2 of the Rapid Rails series. Part 1 featured tips on how to work more efficiently with Rails by making the most of the bundled and related command line tools. This part discusses how to make your Rails application perform faster, with particular focus on server optimisation. Why? Because systems administration requires a very different skill set to programming, and I’ve been often been expected to manage sysadmin tasks on my Rails contracts—and I bet you have too!
I’ve included real-world e…
Rapid Rails is a series of articles containing succinct tips to increase your productivity when working with Ruby on Rails. This is the first part, and shows you how to make the most of the command-line tools that come with Rails.
The Rails generator script (found inside an application’s directory at script/generate) allows you to quickly create templates for anything you need within Rails. As well as models and controllers, you can also use it to write entire migrations:
scr…
