bloganstalt

I’ve been in my comfort zone for far too long now. Over roughly the last one and a half years, I’ve acquired a lot of cruft. Physical cruft. Mental cruft. Things I should have adopted a while ago but didn’t. Stuff I should have stopped doing but still do. Ugly hacks and workarounds I’ve gotten used to. Small to medium pains I’ve ignored too long.

A few examples:

• not using Rails 3, Bundler and Ruby 1.9
• proper integration testing
• copy and pasting stuff from old projects into new ones
• new project setup in general
• still using Apache, Passenger 2 and system-wide RVM for deployment
• setting up new Rails projects takes me about an hour by
• and so on, and so on …

It’s time for all this to change. I’ve already spent around three days reading up on various topics, and boy, it’s a lot to take in. So in order to help me remember what I’ve learned and what’s still on the list, I will accompany this process with a series of articles.

Some of these will not be much more than a list of hand-filtered and commented links, or a bunch of free-form notes. I had originally hoped to get away from WordPress before starting this, but I haven’t. In the end it’s just a tool, it will suffice, and putting off writing because of it would be nothing but an excuse for more procrastination.

So on with it! The rough outline of the series will be as follows:

• Rails 3, Ruby 1.9 and Bundler
  • architecture
  • what’s new
  • gotchas
• Rails application templates
• Improving my testing habits
• Hosting and deployment
  • Passenger 3, custom RVM gemsets and Capistrano
• Better code reuse
  • Writing and publishing my own gems
• Frontend
  • Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate
  • Improving my asset management: better JS and CSS delivery
  • HAML: worth it?
• Development, workflow and good practises