The Mack Framework is a pretty nifty combination of Rails, Merb and many other Ruby frameworks. It’s built off Rack and therefore should be simple to deploy. I really want to work with it, but what to do? Does anyone have any ideas? I need a project.

From a recent IM conversation with a good friend of mine:

Andrew Bloom
12:51 i hate working on shitty codebases
12:51 i wish i had time to do a major refactoring
Stephan Mokey
12:52 yeah, code is never done, it’s just due
12:52 we are artists

Lately I’ve been lacking any personal projects. To compensate I finding myself working on code for my employer (Leapfrog Online) during my free time. That’s not very fun, but my lack of creativity wasn’t able to provide a solution.

All of that changed tonight. For some unknown reason I suddenly came up with a project. I’m not going to say what the actual project is yet, but I will say I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Arduino, and was thrilled to find this: RAD. I will probably end up ordering one of these starter kits when I get back from RailsConf in a week.

I went to RIT for Computer Engineering, and I’ve always loved working with hardware as a hobby. Since I’ve been out of school I really haven’t done much with my soldering iron or bit mask knowledge, mostly Rails work, so this will be a fun change.

This is the first post on the new blog. I’ve completed my move to WordPress from Mephisto. I know what you’re saying. Andrew, you’re a Rails developer, what gives?

It’s simple really, I never did much tweaking inside Mephisto. My hosting company, Media Temple provides a pretty good package called the Grid Server, but one downside is the small amount of memory provided. Because of this I can only run 2 small Rails apps at a time on my share, but they don’t count memory from PHP apps against my space.

I’m sure you see where I’m going by now. Mephisto and Mongrel took up a bunch of memory and responded kind of slow (Grid Server is a shared hosting environment after all). WordPress is quick, clean and has quite a few more features. It’s a bit more complex but the user community is quite large. I’ve managed to migrate my articles, add Google Syntax Highlighter, Google Sitemap, and Google Analytics along with some simple PHP tweaks to this cool theme over the course of 2 short nights.

This is the output from a cool command I found on ones zeros majors and minors

history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' \
| sort -rn | head
124 rake
106 svn
84 ss
36 cd
30 git
26 rm
26 ls
16 sc
10 mate
5 psql

How about you?

And, again from ozmm is the try command. I think I’m going to start adding this to my projects, seems really simple and helpful.

class Object
  ##
  #   @person ? @person.name : nil
  # vs
  #   @person.try(:name)
  def try(method)
    send method if respond_to? method
  end
end

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy working with Rails, but every now and then something about it bothers me. Josh Susser of has_many :through recently blogged about the sometimes differing functionality of size, length and count in ActiveRecord.

Did you catch that, _differing_. When using the count method on association collections ActiveRecord responds differently based on pervious usage. When you’re working alone or on small code bases this might not be a big deal, you might never run into it, maybe you’d even be able to use it to your advantage. The same could be said for larger projects or working with multiple developers, but it’s far more likely to cause a hard to track down bug.

I understand Rails is an open source project controlled by people with their own interests at mind, so please don’t read this as an attack against them or the project in general. I am not the first person to mention these kind of anomalies in the framework, and probably not the first person to have this thought, but would it make sense to fork the project?

I’m not sure it’s worth forking Rails to make it more “enterprisey” (read: consistent). It would be great to have a stable platform, maybe it would receive better acceptance in the office (ie: maybe my python coworkers wouldn’t pick on it). My biggest concern is that removing all these idiosyncrasies will make it impossible to port future creativity from the original authors. Again, that wouldn’t be the end of the world if such a project could attract new development, but I just don’t see that happening. Any thoughts?

I think I’m going to keep a little list going of the things that irk me about Rails. Each time I come across one Merb gets more and more tempting. I really want to dig into Merb, I’ve yet to get do anything more complex than a few basic tutorials, I just need a project…