Wrote a quick rake task to check if Rails assets need to be pre-compiled (which I like to do before deployment) - if there's interest, I will try submitting a pull request to add this to Rails

Simple code snippet showing how to get Puma and Rails talking and running on Heroku, with a plug for Don't Fear the Threads.

An example of using RSpec shared examples to test the seven common RESTful actions in Rails controllers.

Nick guest-starred on Ruby Study Hall, reviewing a set of Capybara tests I had written using his Domino gem. Some good tips on how to keep tests clean and readable and focused on the user's perspective.

Wrote up a quick demonstration of how I combine more high-level Ruby integration tests with fewer unit tests to completely test a codebase without the suite becoming bloated and slow.

How I test SSL apps 12-factor style in my development environment using Pound and Unicorn. This simulates how a Unicorn app runs when deployed to Heroku.

simple_resque abstracts a pattern that's become very common in my recent projects. Unlike the usual Resque setup, I never put the workers in the same codebase as the web app, which required some hacks. This gem provides a thin wrapper over Resque's push method to mimick the way Resque.enqueue works, but doesn't require you to use a class constant.

Here's a journal of my experiences setting up credit card payments in a Rails app using Braintree and the VCR gem.

Simple rake task that chops up audio files for Apple's HTTP streaming protocol and uploads 'em to S3, so you can stream the audio to iOS devices (and also Safari) without getting your app rejected.

How I used the Goliath server from Postrank to proxy API requests to Twilio on behalf of my app's users.

A lot of Rails blog posts recommend that you only turn SSL on in production and don't try to use it in the test or development environments. I explain why this is a big mistake and and present all the code I used to get SSL working with Rails 3, Capybara, and Devise.

Just released a smal broadcast_calendar gem to help you compute which civil dates line up with which broadcast calendar dates. Broadcast calendars are used to normalize radio and TV advertising schedules.

My experiences building a high-throughput reporting system using Cassandra and Ruby.

A short example of how Ruby's built-in Queue class helps one thread defer work to another, in this case to batch update SimpleDB.

Here are a bunch of ideas for implementing Lean Startup techniques in Rails applications.

Quick tip on how to setup Rails caching to use memcached conditionally, when the daemon is running.

Slides and audio from my SXSWi 2009 talk about scaling a Rails application using cloud computing. Surprise, there was very little about Rails that caused us scaling problems. The framework was a natural fit for cloud computing, especially the AWS platform.

The random_data gem provides methods for generating random test data including names, mailing addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and text. v1.5 includes a primitive Markov text generator and an array "roulette" function.

random_data v1.3 is a gem that provides a variety of methods for generating realistic seed data for Ruby applications, including names, mailing addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and text. This release includes support for generating random sentences from a simple grammar and generating random bit vectors.

Quick tip describing how to use Ruby's autoload facility to defer configuration of certain parts of a Rails app.