Think of this scenario. You cut corners to get the project out “on time” (out estimates suck anyway so on time is relative). Then, many months later when the app doesn’t scale to traffic and another dev is hired to recode everything you or your company put together…….what will that do to your reputation? How will that affect referrals you would’ve received from the client you half assed the project for?

We all make mistakes, it’s a fact. That said, there is a clear difference in half-assing something and making mistakes while putting your all into a project. Your all will show regardless of any mistakes you might’ve made.

My advice to other devs: Be honest, be clear, push back when pressured on unrealistic deadlines, keep your reputation at the forefront of decisions and you will be a better coder as a perfect byproduct.

Just my two cents. I’d love input on this if you feel differently.

I’m sitting in the conference hall this morning, coffee in hand, expecting some CEO of blah blah company to drone on about “the convergence of ecosystems as it correlates to inverse of the ROI relative to the”….ZZZZZZZ…you get the idea. In stead, we get a guy yelling things like “Say you sorry!”, “Don’t do stupid sh*t!”, “The Hugh Grant Rule: do some shady sh*t and say your sorry. People respect that!”, “Don’t add noise!”, “Create a dialogue and stop doing all the talking”. The overall conference extended the view of actually having a conversation with customers rather than forcing them to drink from the marketing fire hose.

The take aways for me resulted in a pre-order of Gary’s book “The Thank You Economy” and some interesting thoughts regarding the technology needed to effectively implement and scale the dialogue model. The reality is, I’m in the business of providing technical services, it’s what I’m good at. I can build great things with my technical knowledge, but I often sell short the art and personal touch needed to more effectively market my talents to prospective customers. While I know I’m not guilty of shoving my services down irrelevant channels, I know I can do more to automate where relevant and humanize where appropriate.

All in all, EEC 2011 was a fantastic experience.

My general goal moving forward is to do a better job using the social media and blogging outlets I have developed so many solutions for or around. I wouldn’t classify this as a “new year’s” resolution, but more of a general life resolution. Wish me luck…er…success!

1. HumTum.com – a cool dating website geared towards connecting people from around the world.

2. SitterScout.com – a great social network idea focused on connecting parents with sitters in a community connection method.

If you get a chance, check both of these sites out, they’re free to register.

Both were written in Ruby on Rails using Agile Development methods and SCRUM management.

If you’re starting a project or need additional resources for your project, feel free to contact me to discuss how I might be able to help. I develop in Ruby on Rails, PHP and ASP.NET with very competitive rates.

I’ve taken quite a bit of time over the past month to pick apart and play around with the new features in Rails 2.1. I won’t go into detail about every new feature, you can read all the juicy details here. 

I do want to quickly mention a very nice new feature in ActiveRecord 2.1, the ability to read if a record or a specific attribute in a record has changed. This make validation loops easier to write and minimizes round trips to your database if the application is engineered and tested accordingly. Take a look at the example below and checkout http://www.rubyonrails.org for more details on the 2.1 update. 

 
article = Article.find(:first)
article.changed? #=> false

# Track changes to individual attributes with
# attr_name_changed? accessor
article.title #=> "Title"
article.title = "New Title"
article.title_changed? #=> true

# See both previous and current value with attr_name_change accessor
article.title_change #=> ["Title", "New Title"]

Now, for an avid Rails developer having to code a project in PHP this is the best solution. We have to admit, at times we’re not “allowed” to code a project in Rails. Whether it be a legacy PHP system or a rigid decision by a new client, some times we’re in a situation where we HAVE to code in PHP. Enter Akelos.

So the first thing that caught my attention as a “wow” factor of Akelos over CakePHP, Symfony or one of the other PHP MVC frameworks(besides being a port of Rails) was the use of sintags. This is an especially nice feature for Rails developers using Akelos. 

Sintags allows you to use Ruby syntax in a number of Akelos views including such calls as “render :partial => “your partial name”. This is a fantastic bridge between the two frameworks for someone in my situation. 

Hop on Akelos.org and checkout some of the features and Rails similarities for yourself.

I’ll post some code comparisons of sintags in a future post. 

With this odd system setup I had to get creative with the Capistrano deployment file. I’ve include my solution to the legacy db problem. As you will see, I’ve added “before” and “after” method calls to handle the proper linking of the project and it’s database.yml after building it from within my deploy.rb file.

So what happens now?

Now when you run cap:deploy from your app root the :db namespace will be run prior to the usual setup. This will build the database.yml file from the entry examples below and process the symlink updates after the script has completed.

Voila! A nice, easy way to manage connections to multiple databases through capistrano.

require 'erb'

#require 'mongrel_cluster/recipes'

before “deploy:setup”, :db

after “deploy:update_code”, “db:symlink”

set :user, “–yourusername–”

set :used_sudo, “true”

set :svn_user, ENV['svn_user'] || “yoursvnusername”

set :svn_password, Proc.new { Capistrano::CLI.password_prompt(‘SVN Password: ‘) }

set :repository,

Proc.new { “–username #{svn_user} ” +

“–password #{svn_password} ” +

“–no-auth-cache ” +

“http://–yoursvnurl–/”}

set :spinner, “false”

set :application, “–yourappname–”

set :deploy_to, “/var/www/#{application}”

set :mongrel_conf, “#{deploy_to}/current/config/mongrel_cluster.yml”

role :app, “yourip”

role :web, “yourip”

# role :app, “yourip”

# role :web, “yourip”

# role :db, “yourip”, :primary => true

role :db, “yourip”, :primary => true

namespace :db do

desc “Create database.yml in shared/config”

task :default do

database_configuration = ERB.new <<-EOF

development:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn1

username:

password:

test:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn1

username:

password:

production:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn1

username:

password:

legacy_db1:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn2

username:

password:

legacy_db2:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn3

username:

password:

legacy_db3:

adapter: sqlserver

mode: odbc

dsn: dsn4

username:

password:

EOF

run “mkdir -p #{deploy_to}/#{shared_dir}/config”

put database_configuration.result, “#{deploy_to}/#{shared_dir}/config/database.yml”

end

desc “Link in the production database.yml”

task :symlink do

run “ln -nfs #{deploy_to}/#{shared_dir}/config/database.yml #{release_path}/config/database.yml”

end

end

To do this, add a core_ext folder inside of your project’s lib directory. Next, add a ruby file called core_ext.rb; contents shown below.

#Include each of the files in the core_ext directory
Dir[File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/core_ext/*.rb"].each{ |file| require(file) }


Once your core_ext folder and file are setup in lib you’ll need to tell the environment.rb file to include your core extenders. Append the following line to your environment.rb file.

require 'core_ext'

Once our extensions are visible in the environment we can add our date time handler for dates where DBI is the project adapter. Add a file called DBI.rb in the core_ext directory. Contents shown below.

require "date"
module DBI
  class Date
      def to_friendly_str(options = {})
       t = self.to_time
       t.to_friendly_str(options) rescue self
      end

      def strftime(options = {})
        t = self.to_time
        t.strftime(options) rescue self
      end
   end
end

You’ll notice a non-standard method called “to_friendly_str”. You can replace this with stftime or create a custom date string handler like we did. I’ve added to_friendly_str below if you want to add it to the core_ext directory in addition to the DBI module or you can place it in your application controller. Enjoy!

def to_friendly_str(options = {})
# Attempt to init a new time object
# from this string then call
# to friendly_str on it.
    t = Time.parse(self)
    t.to_friendly_str(options) rescue self
end

Steps successfully used on clean install of Leopard.

1. Download the latest stable release of freetds.
2. Extract freetds tgz file within Downloads
3. Open terminal and cd to Downloads/freetds-0.** folder
4. run “./configure”
5. run “cp /usr/bin/glibtool libtool” <----Important!
6. run "sudo make"
7. run "sudo make install"
8. Next create an ODBC directory in your /Library folder
9. You'll need to create odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files if you don't have any already.

Should look like this

/Library/ODBC/odbcinst.ini:

[ODBC Drivers]
JDBC = Installed

[JDBC]
Description = Sybase JDBC Server
Driver = /usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
Setup = /usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
/Library/ODBC/odbc.ini:

[ODBC Data Sources]
MySQLServer = JDBC

[MyDSN]
Driver = /usr/local/lib/libtdsodbc.so
Description = Description of this database connection
Trace = yes
TraceFile = /tmp/odbc.log
Servername = MySQLServer
Database = YOUR_ACUTAL_DB_NAME
To test:
% iodbctest “dsn=MyDSN;uid=USERNAME;pwd=PASSWORD”

You should be able to run SQL commands at this point.

Now you need to install a couple of Ruby libraries: ruby-dbi and ruby-odbc.

10. Download ruby-odbc version 0.9995 from http://www.ch-werner.de/rubyodbc
11. Extrac tar.gz file and cd to “ruby-odbc-0.999X”
12. run “ruby extconf.rb”
13. run “sudo make”
14. run “sudo make install”
15. Download http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/655/ruby-dbi-all-0.0.23.tar.gz
16. Extract ruby-dbi-all-0.0.23.tar.gz to downloads
17. cd ruby-dbi-all
17. run “ruby setup.rb config –with=dbi,dbd_odbc”
18. run “ruby setup.rb setup”
19. run “sudo ruby setup.rb install”

Congratulations! You should now be happily connect to ODBC connections, namely MSSQL, through ruby again in Apple’s latest OS.

***If you get any errors after freetds install try clearing our *odbc* and *tds* files inside /usr/local/lib directory. Happened to me once in about 5 installs. Likely a missed error and missed sudo command on my part.