on Tue, Apr 12, 2011 by Brandon Harris · 3 min reading time
Memcache is great, and Redis is even better. But you are still bound to a database, and running services. We are so caught up in making everything dynamic, that I think we don't often realize that we are still serving up mostly static html. The good news is that Rails has static html caching built in, and I rarely notice anyone talking about it.
The scenario: You want to input your page content via an administrative interface, but this data rarely changes.
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on Tue, Mar 29, 2011 by Brandon Harris · 1 min reading time
Sometimes, you just don't want to do call the "to_json" message on an object. It could be that the object has a lot of attributes, the json needs are very simple, or you simply don't like the default structure.
Fortunately, there is a very easy solution: JSON templates. This is built in, and you might have not even known it.
In my case, I wanted to plot a bunch of people and their locations on a map.
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on Tue, Feb 01, 2011 by Brandon Harris · 4 min reading time
I recently purchased a matrox dualhead2go digital edition off of ebay on a whim. I did this because I wanted to make use of some extra monitors sitting around the office. I have also come to the realization that I have grown up as a developer and I have enough confidence to look anyone straight in the eye and say – “Yes, I need 3 monitors”.
My current setup is a Dell XPS 1640 running Ubuntu 10.
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