The Enspired Blog

As much as I enjoyed my years developing in Visual Basic and then in C# and ASP.NET, it’s hard to even remember what made it fun. At least, looking at it from the language perspective. The projects were often fun, and I love the creative nature of writing code in general. But the languages were not elegant and the code produced just wasn’t beautiful in the way that I expect code to be these days.

I keep getting emails about .NET positions day after day. After spending over two years working in Rails, and working exclusively in Rails for the last year… how could I go back to .NET? Even if Rails work was impossible to find, I can’t imagine leaving the world of dynamic languages and MVC frameworks.

After yet another job shake up, I’ve found myself in the position of having to really consider the stability of a .NET position. There are lots of them out there, but what is stability without joy in what you’re doing day in and day out? So rather than throwing in the towel, I’m just going to try and take my destiny into my own hands. I’ve launched Rent-A-Railer and I’ve started marketing my independent services. As the name indicates, I’m staying on the Rails. I’m a hired gun, I’m an expert consultant, I’m a moonlighter, I’m and one-man wrecking crew… whatever services you need, I’m your guy! And if it’s more than I can handle, we’ll call in the big guns from Re::Rails.

So if you’re looking for complete end-to-end development services, or you just need someone to step in and get your project launched, get in touch and let me help you succeed. Available for hire… Rent-A-Railer is just a call away.

I’m excited to announce that a new consulting company has formed out of the team that created Lypp. The goal of Re::Rails is to bring this same level of Rails expertise, and proven success to your projects.

Web Application Triage.

Your deRailed projects need not be abandoned. Our team has the skill and experience required in order to properly assess, scope and deploy your Rails project in rapid fashion.

Ruby on Rails Design and Development.

ReRails specializes in the complete design, development and deployment of commercial Ruby on Rails projects. We handle the entire process from concept to production.

Visit Re::Rails online to find out more.

Gaboogie and 37signals have teamed up to create a cool VoIP mashup contest. The signup date has been extended until April 15th.

The Lypp API is RESTful, and supports both xml and json. The API also supports Conditional GET, PUT and DELETE. What I really like about Lypp is that the API is a first-class citizen. The application was designed with a heavy emphasis on the API to make integration with the service a primary interface.

So get on board for the mashup contest and see what brilliant ideas you can come up with. Cutting edge technology, all the Rails goodness and lots of cool prizes… what more could you want?

Wow, it’s such a relief that the conference came off as such a huge success. This was the first time that Rob, from Rails For All, Naomi and I had ever produced a conference event. But apparently we knew enough to not only make it happen, but to actually achieve all that we set out to do. All the reviews circulating in the blog realm are echoing exactly what we had envisioned when planning acts_as_conference.

As with anything of this size and complexity, there’s plenty of room for improvement. We had some issues with the venue, such as spotty wifi and an obstructed view of the projection screen. But the staff at the Holiday Inn (Universal Main Entrance) was very responsive to our requests. Additionally, we need to provide more bottled water for our speakers and we really needed a little more room overall.

Again, I want to really emphasize how awesome our sponsors were. The team from Sun was around all weekend offering great support, amazing tool demos and some very exciting news about upcoming advances for Ruby/Rails thru JRuby and GlassFish. The Engine Yard crew was there providing great support information for common Rails issues, from performance to security and scalability. The guys from Unfuddle pitched in to help us setup the room Thursday night. They were hanging out in all the sessions and always available to lend a hand when needed. Less Accounting had a large presence and provided plenty of humor throughout the event. Rails Machine threw a cool party on Friday night where all the attendees were free to socialize, enjoy food and drink and win some cool prizes. I won’t mention everyone here, but not because the unmentioned sponsors don’t deserve it. I just don’t have time to cover it all.

Our speakers also delivered the goods. Our two keynote speakers were challenging, articulate and inspiring. Our overall goal was to provide both a wide breadth of topics as well as adequate depth in material. Our local community is fairly advanced in their knowledge, so the conference had to provide value for them primarily. We had great presentations on several extending technologies like Adobe Flex/Air and JRuby. We also had several different perspectives on Best Practices, Working with Teams, Teaching Technology and Test/Behavior-Driven Development. To drive the material deep, we had a couple in-depth talks on creating DSLs in Ruby, ActiveRecord and Adding Media to your Rails apps. I believe that our speakers were all top-notch talent with great, but sufficiently humble perspectives on what’s working and what’s not.

If you missed the first acts_as_conference event, you owe it to yourself to plan ahead for next year. There’s already talk of acts_as_conference 2009, right back here in Orlando, FL. Bigger? Better? It’s going to be hard to out do ourselves. Many thanks to those who attended this year… it was a success because the community made it possible.

I’ve been so busy the past couple of days as acts_as_conference got underway. We had a huge last-minute response that left several people wishing there were a few more spots. The turn-out is absolutely amazing and we can’t say enough about the sponsors, speakers and attendees that have made this a success.

We’re about to get underway with day-two. There are lots of great talks coming up today and I hope that everyone comes away recharged, enlightened and ready to come back again next time.

There are only 26 seats available for acts_as_conference, so get your seat before it’s too late. We are in the final stages of pulling the conference together and we’re very excited about the speakers, topics and community that will converge in Orlando on Feb 8th-9th, 2008. You should be with us… no time left for indecision.

I’ve been searching for this solution off and on for a while. There are some features that we don’t want to turn on until the database is migrated past a certain point. It’s pretty rare, but it has come up a few times, so I wanted to document the solution here.

ActiveRecord::Migrator.current_version

Thanks to Jay Fields for the answer. He is a wealth of great information!

There’s a great write-up on acts_as_conference, which is fast approaching in February. Check out the interview with Rob, which highlights our objectives and also scoops some of the latest announcements about the conference including an exciting give-away for those who attend the charity session.

The buzz is going to continue to build and we hope to see the remaining 100 seats go quickly in the next couple of weeks. The acts_as_conference event has something for every web developer who wants to elevate their skills, experience and expand their professional network. If you are already doing Rails or even if you’ve just dabbled with it, you can go much deeper in this two-day event.

Having recently converted to a MacBook Pro a few months ago, the top item on my Christmas wish list was Leopard. I’m actually quite surprised that Santa remembered! From the looks of it I’m going to need a couple of other upgrades, namely RAM and HDD, while I’m at it. But…I’m not sure Santa will approve those additional expenditures.

Now I just have to find the time and the nerves to backup my current build and upgrade. I was kind of hoping other, smarter people would endure the pain and trouble of setting up and documenting the idea Rails on Leopard configuration. Maybe the way has been sufficiently paved ahead of me by now.

If you haven't heard yet... we're holding a regional Ruby/Rails conference here in Orlando on February 8th & 9th. If you haven't registered yet, what are you waiting for? If you wait too long, you may miss the event or have trouble finding a hotel nearby. Tickets are only $100 and you'll get to be a part of the first Rails-centric conference in Central Florida.

If you are working with Rails, or even if you've thought about working with Rails then you won't want to miss this event. There's so much to learn from some of the biggest names and brightest developers from this region.

Register Here

Check out the schedule and the great line-up of speakers and topics.

I’ve been working to wind down all of my websites that were hosted with Site5 as my account was nearing its expiration. I have relocated everything to my new home with Slicehost. Site5 was a great hosting company and they lived up to their esteemed reputation for having great customer service. However, I decided that it was time to grow up a little bit in the world of Rails hosting, so I got myself a tiny “slice”. It’s been a great learning experience moving from a managed/shared hosting environment to a VPS hosting solution.

So, the upside to VPS hosting is that I have full control over my server’s configuration. This allows me to create my ideal Rails environment with only the things I need. I’ve decided for most of my applications that Lightspeed, Rails and MySQL are more than adequate. The downside is that I have full control, which leaves me to my own devices.

For this blog I decided on Mephisto since it seems to be the simplest, best supported, Rails-based blogging application available these days. I don’t know if I’ll convert my old wordpress blog content or not. To be honest, there wasn’t much valuable content there to make it worth the effort. I have comments turned off until I can install better spam filtering. I’ve had a lot to do just to get my sites fully functional, so it’s a slow process to get everything back to 100%.