Development Blog: Viget Labs

On Saturday, August 14th, we’re taking the DevNation tour across the country for our first ever stop in the Bay Area. Our friends at Engine Yard will be hosting us for a day of talks, hacking, and discussion. The lineup is our finest to date, featuring, among others, speakers from Pivotal Labs, LinkedIn, Basho, and Yahoo! and capped off by a keynote from Chris Wanstrath (defunkt of GitHub fame). As always, breakfast and lunch will be provided.

If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you. Registration is only $50 if you sign by this Saturday, so save your money for the happy hour and sign up now.

I’ll say this up front: I love my job. I love the web. I love Rails. And I love working here at Viget. But lately, I’ve gone through periods where web development feels a bit stale. Hugh Macleod has a great post called Beware of Turning Hobbies into Jobs that sheds a bit of light on this problem: once you make a career out of doing what you love, it’s not solely yours anymore. There are clearly bigger problems one could have, but I think this is something all developers struggle with at some point in their careers.

This problem was weighing on my mind one morning, combined with a looming speaking engagement I’d committed to for DevNation Chicago, when it hit me: I would spend a month trying a new technology every day, and then share my experiences in Chicago. Learning is a core value here at Viget, and my coworkers were incredibly supportive, adding to the list of technologies and asking to join me in learning several of them. With their help, coming up with the list was no problem — it was actually harder to get the list down to 30. Here’s what I finally committed to:

Continue reading "Around “Hello World” in 30 Days"

As we saw in some of the earlier posts in the series, the Rails 3 generator API provides a feature that allows you to customize the default generators via plugins or "hooks". For example, you can use a mongomapper generator instead of the default active_record generator in order to generate custom model code. In this installment I'll discuss the hooks that are available in Rails and explain how Rails locates the hooked-in generators as well as show you a great set of existing Rails 3 generator plugins.

Continue reading "Rails 3 Generators: Hooks"

Scaffolding in Rails has always been a little controversial. Originally, it was responsible for a lot of Rails’s wow factor – DHH’s blog in fifteen minutes was built on scaffolding. Over time, however, it became less clear whether it was supposed to be used for production code, or if it was intended to educate new Rails developers on best practices.

After a few discussions through various channels, the core team eventually settled on the latter – scaffolding was supposed to be educational, illustrating the best practices around RESTful controllers and other Rails conventions. Even with that goal, however, there’s still been some difficulty around updating the scaffolded views to teach people how best to, for instance, split files into partials.

Continue reading "Rails 3 Generators: Scaffolding"

Still with me after the last batch of ported generators? Well, I’ve got something new for you this time – and by new, I mean unseen by Rails 2.3.5-looking eyes. That’s right, it’s time to take a look at the generators that make their first appearance in Rails 3!

Continue reading "Rails 3 Generators: Say Hello!"