Category Archives: Ruby on Rails

Circling Back

People have asked me quite a lot lately what I’m going to do now that I’m free and clear of Click Here and my pat answer has been one of two or three things: Find a product-oriented company with a … Continue reading

Posted in Business Strategy, Java, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | Leave a comment

Preserve Semantics in Callbacks

Many people tend to place logic within a method named for the callback (e.g. after_destroy).  This works fine, but tends to be less maintainable, in my opinion. You basically have a method called after_destroy (or whatever), but you don’t readily … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment

Using Constants in Rails Models

One of my pet peeves in code is the absence of constants and thus the prevalence of “magic numbers” in their place. Constants add a touch of readability and semantic meaning and magnify the maintainability of the code. As a … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 6 Comments

GeoKit Updates

I have added a few features and made a few bug fixes to GeoKit. These are as follows: [FEATURE] Added timeout support for geocoder web service calls [FEATURE] Added proxy support for geocoder web service calls [FEATURE] Added support for … Continue reading

Posted in GeoKit, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 11 Comments

Your questions about hire.billeisenhauer.com

A few people have asked about my “hire me” site, so I thought I’d answer them here for everyone. The first question was how did what I put together differ or distinguish me from what anyone could do with a … Continue reading

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Job Seeking 2.0

As many of you know, I’m looking for employment now while my Nokia days come to an end. I thought I would post some thoughts on how you find a job in the current job market. Nevermind that I don’t … Continue reading

Posted in Business Strategy, Java, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | Leave a comment

Final Word on Media Temple

As we speak, I’m now probably 7 minutes into rebooting my Rails container. Why? Because all my apps went down and won’t restart and that’s the only thing I can think of to do. Why is it taking so long? … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments

AppConfig Plugin for Rails

Its probably because I come from the Java world that I felt compelled to create an app configuration mechanism which enabled easy externalization of app properties.  This is not an Earth-shattering, whiz-bang plugin, so I’m not going to oversell it.  … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment

Media Temple & Rails: Failed?

Today I woke up to find that every single one of my Rails apps hosted at Media Temple were down and would not restart.  I received no notifications whatsoever and am somewhat baffled as to why this is the case. … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby on Rails | 3 Comments

Deploying CruiseControl.rb with Custom Tasks

More and more work is being done by geographically disparate teams these days, so a continuous integration tool like CruiseControl.rb is quite useful. Andre and I could have used this when we were heads down with GeoKit. But better late … Continue reading

Posted in Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 4 Comments