Surgeworks is a dynamic and growing company. We’re looking for experienced developers to help expand our custom web development team. We focus on Ruby on Rails applications utilizing best practices including outside-in and BDD. It also wouldn’t hurt to have some PHP experience as well. If you’re interested, shoot an email to jobs at surgeworks.com…. →
Using Raw SQL snippets to create Thinking-Sphinx Indexes
We have used Thinking-Sphinx in several projects to implement search engines. Thinking-Sphinx is a wrapper in Ruby to use ActiveRecord with Sphinx. But in the project I’m working right now I had to solve a different problem: the user should be able to search for formatted values, however without using the formatting characters, i.e, suppose… →
Code blocks with optional arguments in Ruby 1.8.x
Ruby 1.9 has some cool new features. One of them is the ability to define default values for the arguments passed to code blocks, like in the following example: pow = proc { |a, b = 2| a**b } pow.call 3, 3 # 27 pow.call 3 # 9 This is very useful, for instance, when… →
Using cucumber and webrat for remote web testing
Cucumber and webrat serve as a powerful combination of tools for testing your web applications, but in its most common mode webrat can only test your application locally. Is it possible, you may ask, to use webrat to test a remote web site? The answer is yes, with a little tweaking. Webrat has a configuration… →
best railsconf title
The best title had to be When to Tell Your Kids About Client Caching. Parents might identify more with this. Interesting stuff in any case.
Ruby performance work
Railsconf had several performance-related talks. This one went over a lot of interesting territory. Who knew the Date class performed so badly?? Use equivalent ops in Time or get date::performance Use String::<< instead of String::+= Tune your custom sql with virtual attributes It’s surprising that things we might not think are performance issues are problematic… →
RubyMine
During his talk at railsconf, Gregg Pollack showed off Jetbrains Rubymine, an awesome IDE for ruby & rails. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Jetbrains had a spike in their downloads coinciding with the talk. It is a nice IDE. I was happy to see it includes git support out of the box (I… →