Why the hype?

We, at Webreakstuff, just gave birth to our youngest baby: TotSpot (yeah, pun intended).

TotSpot is a publishing platform designed to make it easier to parents to organize and share their tot’s life. Dads and moms of the world can write up journal entries about the toddler’s day-to-day life, upload pictures, link to videos on YouTube and Vimeo and document “firsts” as well as “favorites”. You know, kids’ stuff.

It was built on Ruby on Rails and uses MySQL. On the presentation layer, we use Yahoo!’s User Interface Library on a couple of things including the grids CSS and the little calendar widget for date picking.

Don’t take this for granted, but I think sometime soon we may end up writing a couple of technical posts either on TotSpot’s blog or wherever else about decisions we took or problems/solutions we found while working on TotSpot. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you happen to have a baby, give it a spin.

It seems that this is hitting the web all over again and since I don’t have a lot of time to write about something useful right now, I tried the magic line just to find out something I already knew:

1. I love Ruby, Rake and Textmate
2. We still use Subversion over here – slowly moving to git, though
3. Rails, Rails, Rails: script/server, script/console, svn and rake are the tools of the trade

The raw output:

[tpinto@brokenbones:~] history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  80 ruby
  78 svn
  58 cd
  41 ls
  35 rake
  33 script/server
  19 sudo
  16 script/console
  15 ssh
  15 mate

this is a portuguese post about a portuguese event, the usual english babbling will be back in a bit

Há quase duas semanas, lançámos uma formação em Rails para o público em geral.
Para quem queira aprender a trabalhar com esta framework é uma óptima oportunidade. Para quem já sabe Ruby/Rails, o 3º dia pode ser interessante ao nível do deployment, scaling e outros tópicos avançados.

A formação será nos dias 19, 20 e 21 de Maio em Coimbra, no Hotel Tryp.

Há descontos para estudantes ou para quem queira comparecer nos 3 dias. Mais informações no site do evento: http://training.webreakstuff.com/

Bruno wrote an interesting post about integrating an application’s error logging with ticketing system you can turn bugs (that raise Exceptions) on your application into tickets ready to be taken care of by your developers.

About two years ago, I built an error logging system for a Ruby on Rails application we were developing back then. As pretty much everything in Ruby/Rails, it was really easy to do. I just needed to overwrite the log_error method in the ApplicationController catching every Exception and logging them to the database.

Once you have this setup, you can do whatever you want/need with your errors. You can send an email, write to a file…
Or… Post them as tickets to your favorite ticketing system using its API and thus keeping track of problems on your applications.

Although, there are a couple of small caveats that you should be aware of. One problem might arise if you’re getting very common yet harmless errors. An example: in a Rails app, you’ll get lots of RoutingErrors (everyone mistypes URLs every once in a while) but it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. In order to take care of this you can ignore them by creating a filter that either catches or ignores some Exceptions based on the type. Another problem could be duplication: the system should be able to filter out reports about the same error verifying that before submitting a new ticket.

Looking further at this approach, this can get to deeper levels of customization like mapping Errors of specific types into tickets with different levels of severity or automatically assigning a ticket originated on a given part of the application to the developer in charge, etc.

If you have any ideas about this subject, do leave a comment. I’ll get back to this issue soon exploring the Rails side and suggesting a solution.

A couple of weeks ago, the whole team traveled to Berlin to attend RailsConfEurope and visit the city.

As an european capital I was expecting it to be crowded and kinda messy, yet I was really amazed by the city’s organization and people’s politeness. I loved Berlin and I’m going to go back there for sure, the next time flying from Porto without passing by Lisbon, if possible!

We stayed at the Helter Skelter Hostel (location, right next to the Friedrichstraße) and this is a really cool place to stay if you’re planning to visit Berlin: we tried the XXL apartment and everybody loved it.

RailsConf hasn’t met my expectations: I attended to some interesting talks but others had been a little too superficial. It was a nice place for networking with people working with Rails though.

September will be a great month when it comes to meetings and conferences! The second edition of BarCamp Portugal is set to be on 1-2 in Coimbra and is being organized and hosted by the whole team @ WBS. In September 17-19 we’re also attending to RailsConf Europe in Berlin.

Organizing and hosting BarCamp is a highly gratifying experience. Being free and ad-hoc it is a nice opportunity to gather the good minds we have in Portugal working on the same (or near) areas as we do. I’m sure this will turn into a great event!
BTW, some “link-love” to our sponsor: Waveweb, owner of Gimmestock and Job board. They are buying all the attendees’ dinner!

For the RailsConf days we’re gonna stay at the Helter Skelter Hostel and I will be attending the “Refactoring” and “FLEX and Rails” workshops and I bet everything will be awesome!

Some time ago, I’ve came across SimpleLog when I’ve found that a friend of mine was using it on his blog. Curious, I tried to find out more about SimpleLog and, to be honest, it seemed way too “simple” to me.

Back at that time, Typo has launched its version 4.0 and Mephisto was releasing the first public version. I installed Mephisto and was using it over the last couple of months.

Some days ago, I got tired about Mephisto and looked again into Simplelog. Guess what? It really surprised me! Simplelog has much more to offer than I was expecting: It is a very polished Rails blogging engine. It has a nice Administration Panel, lots of configurable options and some delicious details.

What caught my eye was, for sure, the live demo. Be sure to drop by and test it out. I’m sure you’ll love it.

From today, I’ll be blogging using SimpleLog and reviewing some of its features, what I like and what I’d change in it. Also, I’ll create a new theme for “Why the hype?”, making it unique and also trying to give away some love to Simplelog’s community.