We just finished the first stand-up. A stand-up according to the scrum/xp practices is just an occastion to say what you did yesterday, what you are going to do today and any problems you encountered if any. The stand-up followed a sprint review & retrospective we had last night. The amount of work ...

Some of Los Señores del Merb, AKA the Merb “core team” met tonight in a secret location in San Diego, CA. Obviously, we had to meet in a Mexican restaurant and enjoy Tuesday Fish Taco night special ;) While not everybody could make the trip, Yehuda, Andy, Daniel, Carl and myself met to plan the ver...

Mode changes to init.rb, user updating to a newer version or Merb will need to add c[:log_file] = Merb.root / “log” / “development.log” to their init.rb file or config/environments/development.rb for instance. (Newly generated apps are already setup properly) We made some changes to the way Rake fil...

I thought I should share few changes that my affect your apps if you want to upgrade to Edge. merb_helpers which was previously in merb-plugins now moved to merb-more and got renamed merb-helpers. What that means for you is that you probably want to install merb-helpers and change the reference in ...

Merb 1.0 is almost ready to be pushed out and you might be impatient to start playing with some of the goodies not yet available in the latest stable release. Before getting started, you should know that not everything has been ironed out yet so don’t expect to have a fully stable Edge. The easiest ...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“224” caption=“Mint was originally used as a medicinal herb to treat stomach ache and chest pains. (Something developers eating too much pizza know a bit too well)"][/caption] Paul Sadauskas aka Rando posted a very interesting article showing how he handles ex...

I actually run into a small problem when updated an older Merb app. Here was how my router looked like: Merb::Router.prepare do |r| r.resources :channels do |channels| channels.resources :shows do |shows| shows.resources :episodes end end end But after updating to the latest version of Merb, I got l...

If you read this blog, you probably know that Merb’s best ORM friend is DataMapper. [caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“240” caption=“compounds in basil oil have potent antioxidant and is used for supplementary treatment of stress”][/caption] Merb works very well with ActiveRecord and Sequel but...

Yesterday I spyed on wycats aka Yehuda Katz while he’s working on cleaning things up for 1.0 which will be released during MerbCamp Oct 11-12. Here is the screenshot of how you would see ugly backtraces originating from Merb’s core: [caption id=“attachment_83” align=“aligncenter” width=“150” caption...

[caption id="" align=“alignright” width=“182” caption=“Fennel, one of the primary ingredients of absinthe helps developers' creativity."][/caption] Good news regarding Merb slices: the new router allows you to mount a slice directly as: /the-slice-action (previously it had to be /the-slice/something...

Dear Merbivores/Merbists/Merbians, It’s hard to believe that in less that 20 days, Merb 1.0 will be released! We are all really happy to to be almost there but we have to be honest and admit that we are also under pressure. We are all dreaming of a post 1.0 world but in the meantime we have to focus...

Since Merb 0.9.7 the Merb team decided to change the way you can bundle an app. Until 0.9.7 you would use the merb-freezer plugin which was supporting git submodules and gems. The only problem was that you still had to install merb-freezer on your server and it had to stay in sync with your app… kin...

That’s now finally official, MerbCamp 2008 registration are open! What an exciting time! History To understand why I’m excited, we need to go back few months back. Merb was first released by Ezra has an alternative tool to handle file uploads. Merb came to reality because Ezra needed something fast,...

Like most people who started with Rails a while back, I first loved Rails fixtures and ended up hating them (slow, a pain to maintain etc…). I went through different experiments, trying different existing libs, writing my own solutions etc… I wasn’t quite satisfied until I found factory_girl from th...

Wow, it’s been a while since I blogged. With all the cool kids saying that spending time reading RSS feeds is overrated (see Defunkt’s keynote for instance) I even wonder if people will ever read this post! Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a bunch a great Engin...

Github, probably the most famous social code hosting service just redesigned their homepage and are now featuring hosted projects. I got a very good surprise when Takeo from Powerset & Stafftool hall of fame mentioned to me that Github picked one of my gems as the first featured project! By the way,...

In a previous article I took an example of bad metaprogramming and I pushed people to think twice before using metaprogramming. My main points were that: you might make your code way slower if you don’t know what you are doing readability might drop considerably maintainability can become an issue P...

I realized I haven’t updated this blog in a while. Here is a quick update on what’s happened and on things to come: RailsConf 08. Great conference, probably my last Rails Conf though. I’ll be in Orlando for Ruby Conf 08 and I’ll focus on 1 or 2 local conferences (probably mountain west and another o...

Ruby is sexy, Ruby is cool and its metaprogramming potential offers some really cook features. However you might not realize that your cleverness is slowing down your code. Today I was working on cleaning up merb_helper a Merb plugin that brings a lot of the stuff Rails developers are used to. In Me...

Just a reminder, this coming week end, San Diego presents BarCamp for the third time. This time, the chosen Venue is Microsoft in La Jolla I was thinking about preparing 2 intro talks, one on Merb and one on Unobtrusive Javascript (jQuery, Prototype + LowPro etc…), then we’ll see the crowd and what ...

As you’ve probably heard, Rails now moved to its own GitHub repo. If, like me you were a heavy piston user, you are wondering how you will be able to do the same thing if you switch to git. First off, you need to know that Piston will soon support git. As a matter a fact it already does. At least yo...

THIS CONTENT is OUTDATED and can’t be used with Merb 1.0 or more recent Merb doesn’t really have a core team per say. It’s actually managed the same way Rubinius is managed meaning that few people such as Ezra, Wycats and Ivey lead the development while many other contributors have commit rights to ...

If you follow my blog, you already know what Merb is. I love Rails and I truly believe it has changed web development. At least it has changed the way I do web development. But Merb looks slick, apparently is way faster than Rails, and has less “fluff” and less magic. Now that we are getting really ...

_* this content is now outdated and only applied to Merb 0.9_* I the previous post I covered few useful tips for Merb 0.9. The good news is that Merb should get its wiki setup over the week end! Here is another batch of hopefully useful tips: In init.rb, you can define a dependency and specify a ver...

_* this content is now outdated and only applied to Merb 0.9_* I’m working on a post reporting a recent benchmark I did comparing Rails vs Merb performances for a client’s app. In the meantime, here are few tricks you might need when using Merb 0.9x In the init.rb file, uncomment and rename c[:sessi...

I’m sure, at least once in your life you played with Duplos. Duplo bricks are eight times the size in volume, twice the length, height and width of traditional Lego bricks, and are easier to handle for younger children. Despite their size, they are still compatible with traditional Lego brick. Duplo...

I started moving some of my projects to GitHub. Here is my GitHub account. Projects moved to GitHub: GlobaLite ActiveRecord Backup mimetype-fu I’m planning on moving GoogleCharts, RandomWordGenerator and some not released stuff to GitHub so people can have fun forking my projects. Git and GitHub are...

If you don’t know about git and github yet, it’s time you clean up your RSS feeds and find some good source of information. Github is used by the Merb core team and I’ll show you how to use github to fork Merb, make your modifications and “submit your patch”. This is the exact reason why github is s...

I’ve been using git and git-svn for a little while and never had a problem… until today. On one of my project, we have a SVN repo but since I prefer using Git, I’m using git-svn. Git-svn has been great, it let me create my own local branches for each new set of features (that’s when I don’t forget t...

For the last few months I worked on a Rails app called GumGum. GumGum is a licensing and distribution platform for online content. GumGum believes paying a flat rate to license content for online use is illogical. Offline, the flat rate model works because distribution is finite. Online, thanks to G...