Wow, I have really been too busy to find time to post anything lately.  Lots going on the last couple of weeks.

We just started a new project that it totally cutting edge and I am so excited to be a part of it.  Intern #2 Steve Tong, is now fulltime on the new project as a Junior Developer.  Truth be said, Steve Tong was not mush of an intern as he was already passed that point skill wise.  Something that Steve T. displayed that impressed me is his ability to think outside the box.  I know that is a horrible cliche but it is what distinguishes a developer from a programmer.  The new gig is mostly a concept so we are able to design / create it as we feel fit, and that is what requires a developer that has ideas and can envision something great.  For now the who what and where obviously will remain a secret but I guarantee that I will be blogging about it as soon as it goes live.

So what makes a great intern?  Simply put, motivation.  It does not matter how much or how little you know or even at times, how fast you can learn it.  What does matter is the effort and the motivation to make it as a developer.  I recently met a junior developer that is mostly doing front end stuff and has expressed the desire to become a Rails developer.  What impressed me already is that he learned Git over the weekend.  He was using some crazy GUI for accessing Github and I gave him a hard time about it.  So I guess he showed me!!

Some cool things that I have learned about recently……

Select2 for rails asset pipeline

Select2 is a jQuery based replacement for select boxes. It supports searching, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results.

The select2-rails gem integrates the Select2 jQuery plugin with the Rails asset pipeline.

Awesome and so easy to use for kick ass drop downs.  A must have in your rails toolshed!

RABL for Rails

RABL (Ruby API Builder Language) is a ruby templating system for rendering resources in different format (JSON, XML, BSON, …). You can find documentation here.

rabl-rails is faster and uses less memory than the standard rabl gem while letting you access the same features. There are some slight changes to do on your templates to get this gem to work but it should’t take you more than 5 minutes.

rabl-rails only targets Rails 3+ application and is compatible with mri 1.9.3, jRuby and rubinius.

If you use a lot of json, this is the gem for you!!!

Easy git deployment

Straightforward, Heroku-style, push-based deployment. Your deploys will look like this:

$ git push production master

To get started, install the “git-deploy” gem.

$ gem install git-deploy

Screw using all the hard stuff.  With this I can now deploy to staging or production just as easily as pushing to me fork.

Rails ERD

Rails ERD is a plugin for Ruby on Rails that generates diagrams based on your Active Record models. Such an entity-relationship diagram gives an overview of your models and how they are associated. Browse through example diagrams, or read the installation instructions.

Well, that is about it for this post.  Enjoy!!