Confreaks

"Ruby can't scale."

Tell that to LivingSocial, Groupon, Gowalla, Sony, and the rest of our community pushing millions of requests per day. Scaling an application isn't about piling up hardware and dropping in the newest database fad, it's the c...

In the wide world of web service development, Ruby is rarely the first pick as a platform to build on. Slowness and scalability are usually the reasons given to go with Java or something less friendly. However, language is rarely the bottleneck in...

We've all seen load tests of a single "hello world" HTTP server using tools like ab or httperf. But what about load testing for real world Web applications and testing architectures that go beyond a few processes on a single machine? What about te...

We've all seen the monolithic Rails model, pages and pages of methods all dumped into one class. Inevitably someone starts moving things around just to feel better about the loc count without making any real difference. How can we reify actions on...

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." – Jeff Hammerbacher http://buswk.co/eCdfFp We can rewrite Jeff's quote like this: "The best programmers of my generation are working on solutions to problems tha...

Rails did a lot to bring REST to developers, but its conception leaves the REST devotee feeling a bit empty. "Where's the hypermedia?" she says. "REST isn't RPC," he may cry. "WTF??!?!" you may think. "I have it right there! resources :posts ! Wha...

As we enter a decade of applications developed with Ruby on Rails, many teams are starting to feel growing pains relating to design decisions that were made in the past. Development slows down, and morale declines. Fresh competitors without the cr...

Life as a startup, whether a bootstrapped company or an experimental project within an enterprise, is hard. You have to struggle to earn success. Lean, pivots, minimal viable products, and other buzzwords all steps along this journey. The struggle...

If you take a look at software today, you'll see more smart people building things than there ever have been before. The problem? They're all working in different languages, on different platforms, with different concepts. To take advantage of the...

I've been writing Rails for near on five years, and there are some things that really grind my goat. Rails is great, but there are so many things we get wrong, both as a framework and a community. In particular, for applications that have grown be...

Let's be honest, Ruby became mainstream a few years back and it isn't the cool underground programming language it once was. It's quite likely that your cousin's boyfriend who's "into computers" knows what Ruby on Rails is. There are hundreds of ...