Upcoming BarCamp and Montreal on Rails

Next BarCampMontreal is this weekend, November 3rd, I’ll be giving a short presentation on RefactorMyCode.com. I’ll also be giving away a free special and unique gift to celebrate RmC success and announcing a new secret feature, be there!
Montreal on Rails is next week, November 6th, I won’t be giving a presentation on anything, but lots [...]

Moving to Rails 2.0

I know … it’s like exercising, you know you’ll be better afterwards but you don’t feel like going trough the pain right now. Updating a framework can be a pain, here’s a short list summarizing what I had to do to migrate RefactorMyCode from Rails 1.2.3 to 2.0 (Preview). I hope this makes it easier [...]

Blogging from TextMate

It occurred to me that some people are still writing their blog post from WordPress, that is so last year. I also realized, while reading Hugh McGuire question, that TextMate is really powerful for blogging. I’ve been using it for quite some time now but didn’t realize until now all the tiny features I use [...]

Blitzweekend : Don’t do it!

This post is cross-posted on Blitzweekend’s blog
When Heri asked me to write a post on Blitzweekend’s blog to share some of my tips on building an app in one weekend I thought only of this one:
Don’t do it!
Truth is, if your manager and boss finds out you can do in 2 days what takes us [...]

Gravatar caching plugin

Gravatar is slow.
You use Gravatar on your site.
Your site is slow.
We hate slow site.
Caching is fast.
Cache Gravatars on your site.
Your site is fast!
Get it!
script/plugin install http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/gravatar_cache
Or using piston:
piston import http://code.macournoyer.com/svn/plugins/gravatar_cache vendor/plugins/gravatar_cache
Place something like this in your Rakefile:

def gravatar_emails
User.find(:all).collect(&:email) # Return the emails you wanna cache
end

Now put everything in place for showtime:
rake gravatar:setup
Cache it!
rake [...]

Refactoring of the week

Since last week I pushed a whole lot of new features to RefactorMyCode:

Email notification when a new refactoring is posted
Edit your refactoring
More caching to make page loading über fast
Make popular page sort by week first, so old stuff doesn’t stay on top
Add an alternative OpenID in case your main one is down (set it in [...]

3 simple tips to make your Rails app 100 times faster

After the initial meltdown of the RefactorMyCode server I had to find a solution to put it back online fast!
Here are 3 things I did that helped me put the app back online and made it amazingly fast serving more then 50 000 page load in a day, even if it was hosted on a [...]

Refactoring of the week

RefactorMyCode.com has now been (publicly) live for a week. It was amazing! Who would have though a simple site like this could attract more then 100 000 visits in a week ?
But what surprises me the most is how much the community is alive and healty. I haven’t had any spam really yet, well maybe [...]

Montreal On Rails 3 tomorrow

Have you ever dreamed about being amongst the best developers in town ? Well, here’s your chance : Montreal on Rails is tomorrow! With 3 of the best Rails hacker in the world (of Montreal at least) presenting!
It’s in our StandoutOffice (suite 615). Register in the following 15 minutes and get the chance to sit [...]