Introspecting Rails Models and Controllers Callbacks
Once models and controllers grow to a certain size and complexity, it gets tricky to figure out what callbacks act upon them. This is especially true for objects that are several inheritance layers deep, have multiple mixins, were written a long long time ago, or any combination of the above. I've picked up a few tools for crushing nasty little callback buggers that crop up every now and then. I hope you find them useful!
Ruby Postgresql Gem Cleanup
I ran into some trouble with getting a good native postgresql driver installed. Here are some links and resources I found to be useful. I also wrote a checklist for bootstrapping a new Rails app with postgres as the adapter.
Fast Tracked iPhone Development
Jumping into a new language, a new framework, and a new set of tools is overwhelming! But the best way to learn is to be utterly crushed by the technology, then have friends pick up the pieces. Once you've seen a good broad overview of what's available, you're more capable of finding resources on your own. Here is my chronological step by step guide to getting bootstrapped.
Adventures with ActiveRecord find
Retrieving records from the database and mapping the results into ActiveRecord models are a big part of every Rails app. A large majority of your controllers will retrieve one or more ActiveRecord models. For something as important and fundamental as 'find', knowing more of it's options and idioms can help you write less, write it more elegantly, and do more.
Rails 2.2.2 Chicken and Egg Migrations Headache
For this upcoming March release, we plan to upgrade from Rails 2.1 to Rails 2.2.2. When testing bootstrapping fresh instances of our app, we ran across an annoying migrations problem. Read on to see how we resolved it.