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The Buckblog

assorted ramblings by Jamis Buck

Tips & Tricks

Apr 2016

Tapping ActiveRecord Relations

23 April 2016 — A technique is demonstrated, calling Object#tap to reuse an ActiveRecord relation instance in order to accomplish more than one task — 2-minute read

Feb 2016

Don't Feed the Hamster the Whole Stalk

20 February 2016 — A parable is presented about reasonable API design — 6-minute read

Oct 2015

The Dynamic Def

17 October 2015 — Playing around with Ruby's def statement. Also, the author introduces a throw-away project for playing interactive fiction games in irb — 8-minute read

Aug 2015

Reducing a Number to Its Sign

5 August 2015 — A simple technique is presented for extracting the sign of a number — 2-minute read

Jul 2015

tar.gz in Ruby

23 July 2015 — A method is described for reading and writing tar and gzip files, using only the Ruby standard library — 3-minute read

Mar 2015

Playing with Constants, Methods, and Superclasses

24 March 2015 — 3-minute read

Task Tracking for Neurochemical Brains

17 March 2015 — 4-minute read

Mar 2010

Unobtrusive, yet explicit

1 March 2010 — 4-minute read

Nov 2008

Vim Follow-up

17 November 2008 — 4-minute read

Aug 2008

Cloning Ubuntu Hardy image in VMWare Fusion

15 August 2008 — 2-minute read

Apr 2008

Net::SSH::Multi + Rake == Tasty Potential

11 April 2008 — 1-minute read

Apr 2007

Faking cursors in ActiveRecord

6 April 2007 — 2-minute read

ActiveRecord::Base#find shortcut

4 April 2007 — 1-minute read

Mar 2007

Raising the right exception

7 March 2007 — 1-minute read

Rendering empty responses

5 March 2007 — 1-minute read

Feb 2007

Poor-man's pagination

28 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Dereferencing fixtures

26 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Route#to_s

19 February 2007 — 1-minute read

begin + else

8 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Infinity

7 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Overriding attributes in ActiveRecord

6 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Nesting resources

5 February 2007 — 2-minute read

Per-developer configuration

1 February 2007 — 1-minute read

Jan 2007

More on watching ActiveRecord

31 January 2007 — 1-minute read

Unit vs. Functional vs. Integration

30 January 2007 — 3-minute read

Testing your views

29 January 2007 — 2-minute read

Object#with_options

24 January 2007 — 2-minute read

Named, explicit routes

22 January 2007 — 3-minute read

Blocks rock

19 January 2007 — 2-minute read

ActiveRecord association scoping pitfalls

18 January 2007 — 3-minute read

Concerns in ActiveRecord

17 January 2007 — 2-minute read

Extending render

16 January 2007 — 2-minute read

More inline RJS

12 January 2007 — 1-minute read

Moving associated creations to the model

11 January 2007 — 2-minute read

Inline RJS

10 January 2007 — 1-minute read

Extending ActiveRecord associations

9 January 2007 — 3-minute read

Watching ActiveRecord Do Its Thing

8 January 2007 — 2-minute read

Brevity vs. Clarity

5 January 2007 — 2-minute read

assert_xml_select

4 January 2007 — 2-minute read

rcov

3 January 2007 — 2-minute read

assert_select

2 January 2007 — 1-minute read

Oct 2006

Rake deploy with multiple staging targets

19 October 2006 — 1-minute read

Helping ActiveRecord finders help you

6 October 2006 — 1-minute read

Running tests on deploy

5 October 2006 — 1-minute read

Mongrel, SSL, and Apache 1.3

3 October 2006 — 2-minute read

Sep 2006

Capistrano cheat sheet

30 September 2006 — 1-minute read

Inspecting a live Ruby process: Day 2

23 September 2006 — 1-minute read

Inspecting a live Ruby process

22 September 2006 — 3-minute read

Capistrano: Not just for Rails

21 September 2006 — 1-minute read

Feb 2006

TestUnit Inheritance Hierarchies

28 February 2006 — 1-minute read

Tip: TextDrive and Lighttpd

11 February 2006 — 2-minute read

Jan 2006

Separate passwords for svn/ssh via SwitchTower

16 January 2006 — 1-minute read

Using SwitchTower with multiple deployment stages

3 January 2006 — 2-minute read

Dec 2005

Two tips for working with databases in Rails

13 December 2005 — 2-minute read

Oct 2005

Easy ActiveRecord Scripts

3 October 2005 — 1-minute read

Sep 2005

SwitchTower on OSX

24 September 2005 — 1-minute read

Aug 2005

Conditional SwitchTower Configuration

27 August 2005 — 1-minute read

Enumerated types in Ruby

7 August 2005 — 1-minute read

Fun with SwitchTower

7 August 2005 — 3-minute read

Jan 2005

Making CGI Rails Faster

21 January 2005 — 2-minute read

Nov 2004

Now that's cool

13 November 2004 — 2-minute read

Oct 2004

Reloading Dependencies

10 October 2004 — 1-minute read

Mar 2004

Up and Running

21 March 2004 — 2-minute read

Just When You Think You Know it All...

18 March 2004 — 2-minute read