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Let’s face it: as a developer, I’m lazy. I just want to write just enough code. What is more, I want to reuse it whenever possible. I want it to be abstract. If I’m asked to implement a view which needs a sortable grid, one of those whose rows you...

One of our Rails applications has to consume an RSS. Nothing fancy here, we simply wanted to extract some fields from each item and store them in the PostgreSQL DB (app was hosted on heroku). Simply slicing the string seemed to work at first: summary

This week we’ve updated nuntium to version 2.8, yay! Aside from some minor bug fixes, nuntium now implements an exponential backoff strategy when a message delivery fails. Previously, it worked like this: A message failed to be delivered. If the...

I’m currently in the process of upgrading an application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. Fortunately, it’s not the first time someone does so, and there’s plenty of resources throughout the web that will help you to work it out. In particular, I chose to...

Introducing cukecooker: writing cucumber scenarios with aid

The Gettext C# Utilities GNU project, containing convenient classes, templates, scripts and tools for easily implementing gettext i18n support for C# and ASP NET applications, has been polished up and version 1.0 is ready for download. I’ve written...

As an intermezzo in the blog posts regarding my thesis, I’d like to point out an unexpected (or at least, unexpected for me) behaviour in Python’s way of constructing default arguments. Suppose we have the following python class MyClass, with an initializer...

Install the RMagick gem in the painless way with Homebrew

Many times we end up having similar tests: same logic but different inputs and expected outputs. For example, suppose we need to test our brand new sqrt function: test "sqrt 1" do assert_equals 1, sqrt(1) end test "sqrt 4" do assert_equals 2,

Deleting children with accepts_nested_attributes_for in Rails