Sometimes, it’s worth stating the basics for all to see:

Follow the Model-View-Controller paradigm.  In particular, your views house your user-interface, your models handle the application and your controllers mediate between the two.  Controllers do not contain rules, conditionals dealing with business conditions, queries looking for objects related to the one in question.  All those things [...]

I’ve had this before so I should have learnt my lesson. But I didn’t.
I had a site, inherited from another developer, that was migrated to a new server.
The other developer sent me the images associated with the site and I dutifully copied them over. I took a look - lots of “missing [...]

Normally I wouldn’t talk about Ruby on Rails on this blog. That geek talk is found on the tech blog instead.
But, despite being about Rails, this isn’t a tech post. It’s about a problem that you will face when trying to hire a Rails developer.
Rails has a number of advantages.

It is a framework [...]

Weird one here.
I was working on some code that had controllers within a namespace (Admin::ThingyController). The controller descended from an Admin::BaseController. And Admin::BaseController included a module (include GenericStuff), which in turn was defined within the Admin namespace.
So far, so good.
The code-base was actually somebody elses and the time came for me to add [...]

After recently praising test fixtures as an important (but time-consuming) part of building your tests, there is something to watch out for.
If you get one of your foreign key references wrong in your fixture data you can get odd results. In particular I had a test that passsed when run using ruby test/unit/my_test.rb but [...]

You know how it is - there are some things that you are just not comfortable without. My phone in my back pocket, my wallet in my front pocket, the key in the front door when I go to bed (just in case there’s a fire and we have to make a hasty exit), [...]

I did my little presentation on Rails last night. “Why Rails programmers are so smug?” in front of 30-40-odd geeks in 20/20 format.
The 20/20 was hard - for those that don’t know, it’s twenty slides, each given twenty seconds. It means you know exactly what you have to deal with, but [...]

I remember years ago, when Object-Orientated Programming became fashionable, every single text on it (at least those that I could be bothered to read) repeated the mantra “OO is about inheritance”. Of course, that’s rubbish, but when you’ve been dealing with structs in C or Cobol it’s probably an easy way of thinking of [...]

Migrations are great. Not perfect but pretty damn good. Certainly better than my previous experiences of handling databases (grab the structure from dev, compare it to qa and then construct a script to move from one to the other - if you are lucky with a tool like Sql Compare, if you’re not [...]

James Hoskins makes a good point, on the North West Ruby User Group mailing list, about the recent Rails to PHP switch.
This my friends is what seo’ers call link bait. Notice the nice digg friendly title with a low number at the beginning followed by a lovely language war headline? Story goes up [...]