Just a reminder, now that RailsConf registration is now open… don’t forget to create your account at the RailsConf 2007 Meetup site. The password is “chunky bacon”.
Update:
If you created your account before today, go back and update your profile to add URLs for your site and your feed, if you have them.
I was just reviewing the Google Analytics stats for the month of January for AgileWebDevelopment.com, the home of the Rails plugin directory, and saw some interesting numbers.
The number of “absolute unique visitors” for the month was 12,295. Those visitors logged 22,814 visits and 75,890 page views.
I would guess that AWD isn’t necessarily one of the first sites you would see when you are just casually gathering info about Rails, but instead probably gets most of its visits from people who are actually using Rails. If that guess is true, then I’ll also guess there’s about 10,000 Rails developers out there (discounting the 12,295 number a bit for cases like one person at multiple computers, casual browsers who found the site but aren’t using Rails, etc.). That’s cool.
If you are looking for a Rails developer to do some work for you, someone who has written the book on doing e-commerce with Rails :), and who has experience in every aspect of designing, developing, and deploying Rails applications, do get in touch. I’m available for projects large and small, near and far.
There has been a lot of irb love happening lately, and I’m lovin’ the irb, too.
After launching a Rails e-commerce application recently, I was taking a look through the database just to make sure things were working as expected. Lo and behold, I found a problem. Something funky was happening with a small number of the orders. Time to dig in.
The problem centered around calculating discounts, which calculations can be affected by a number of variables present at the time of checkout: the particular items in the cart, the discount code used, etc. In other words, it would be somewhat difficult to work out what should have happened versus what actually happened by taking the relevant data and doing the calculations by hand. In this case, it would be much easier to actually poke at the transactions in question and play with the code as it would have interacted at the time of the transaction. Rails console to the rescue!
What’s that you say? Invoking irb from inside irb? Madness! What does it do? It loads another session inside your current session, and now self points to the results of that Sale.find. Why is this so useful? Well, suppose you have an instance method in the Sale class that does a lot of calculations, pulling in the related discount, related line items, etc., and it has references to self.this and self.that all over the place in there. With a little help from this irb sub-session, now you can play with that code as it was written, and (in this case) as it was executed against the instance when the instance was first created.
So, with this powerful tool in hand, and a little time poking at the discount calculations, I found my problem, wrote a test that reproduced it, fixed it, and repaired the affected transactions. Yay irb!
With all the job boards that have been popping up lately, I was starting to feel left out. So, I launched my own. :)
Go visit the newest Ruby on Rails job board to see jobs that will be advertised on every page of AgileWebDevelopment.com, the home of the rails plugin directory.
Jobs will list for $200 for 30 days, but I’m offering a $100 discount for the first week just to kick things off. If you use the coupon code EarlyBird before the 14th, you can list your job for $100 rather than $200.
Do we really need another job board? Yes, for two reasons:
So, if you’re in the market, fire away and post a job listing to find a Rails developer. If you’re looking for a Rails job, wait a few days until there’s a post or two. :)
And congrats to the JobCoin crew. They’ve put together a cool service.
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