Erik's Engineering

I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me sooner.  Most folks customize their irbrc file with tools to add features.  Why not use it to add helpers for things you do all the time?  I find myself loading up an example user record all the time, so I ginned up the following and stuck it in my .irbrc

It's a bit more convoluted than you'd normally expect, but by dancing around the subject a bit I made it so that this will compile just fine even if User isn't defined or doesn't support find_by_email.  I don't want irb/console to refuse to start because something isn't defined.

I just thought of this, so I'm not sure where it's going yet.  I'm going to be looking out for other opportunities to do this and thinking about how I might make it easier.  Perhaps a gem that would recognize if you were doing a Rails console session and load an application-specific irb helper file?

I released a side project last weekend and it was featured on the front page of Slashdot on Monday.

I walk through the steps to create a new Rails app, using Ruby 1.9, Rails 3, Rspec and Cucumber.

So you're at work, building an awesome rails app for your coworkers to use. Then someone says "can you make it so people can log in with their Windows credentials?" That means ActiveDirectory integration.

A very brief introduction to using RabbitMQ with Carrot to send data between processes asynchronously.

I wanted to add a nice AJAXified page to display the most recent temperatures from around the house. I walk through the steps involved. This post is longer than the code by a large margin.

Setting up a new laptop, I ran into problems getting Postgres and ruby-serialport to play nicely with Ruby 1.9.1.

To help work out some climate control issues around my house, I designed a custom sensor platform that reports back to my server and lets me see how the temperature in different parts of the house is interrelated. This post introduces the project.