Ever needed to get the timezone of the end user's browser in a rails app? This should be a trivial operation, but it isn't. It is now, because I've wrapped all the plumbing up as a rails engine.

the tz_magic gem

Ever wonder how to measure and tune your application's performance? In Performance Tuning Apache and Passenger, I show how we used httperf, htop, iftop, and a handful of other tools to measure, tune, and identify performance hotspots in your application. While this deals a lot with Rails, Apache, and Passenger, what I cover about the use of the tools apply to any http server-side process.

A friend of mine recently turned me onto semantic.gs, the semantic grid system. I just packaged it up as a gem for use with the asset pipeline.

Interested in using the jQuery full_calendar in a rails3 app? Check out my blog post and github repo with a working example showing how to do it restfully with the jquery.rest plugin.

Ever deploy a rails application that seemed slow once it had real data in it? Ever tweak a few things in your my.cnf and it perked things up, but really didn't know what the correct values should be? My blog entry on 4 Mysql settings you should tune and how to tune them might be just the performance prescription you need.

Rubyist, CodeSherpa, and ruby5 co-host David Bock is publishing a new series of screencasts. The first one is up, and its about git-flow.

A colleague of mine recently wrote rescue_me, a small wrapper for exception-generating code that retries with exponential backoff. We had to connect to a sporadically flaky webservice, and this bit of code made our stuff a lot more robust with minimal effort.

The second in a series of articles on securing services on linux, Secure a MySQL server in 10 minutes.

Using memcached? Did you see the recent security news? Learn how to secure memcached in two minutes.

Following up on my post about an Agile Maturity Assessment, I'm discussing the difference between an assessment and a certification, and why an agile team should care about assessments.

I just released dunce-cap; several useful recipes to prevent some boneheaded mistakes with your capistrano deploy.

I have been thinking about an agile maturity assessment model for years, as this blog article illustrates. Its time to take it to the next level with this blog series. I'm inviting mature discussion, realizing that there will be a small controversy about this. I'm hoping it acts as a forge for the ideas.

I recently launched my business_time gem for doing date math with business hours, weekends, and holidays. This blog entry shows the usage.