This is part of a series on Rails 2 Upgrade Turbulence . Staging and testing a big release is important, but there are some factors that can only be obsereved in the true production environment. Sure, I can replay the most interesting 80% of a yesterday's traffic against a test server without it failing – but I'm onl...

This is part of a series on Rails 2 Upgrade Turbulence . Now that I had confidence that the code was production-ready, it was time to merge changes back into trunk. We still have a main SVN repository, although most people use the git-svn bridge. This proved problematic in three ways which have nothing to do with Rails wha...

This is part of a series on Rails 2 Upgrade Turbulence . ActiveRecord associations have changed. There are some gotchas, at least compared to the Rails 1.1.6 frame of mind. Join v. Queries Instead of forcing a join against the tables for every incuded association, ActiveRecord is now smart enough to split things into separ...

This is part of a series on Rails 2 Upgrade Turbulence . Urbanspoon uses sessions to store various bits of information in the database that users might want to see again. We have a neat hack that Adam wrote to turn off sessions for bots so that we don't need to touch that table unless necessary. Unfortunately, his trick de...

This is part of a series on Rails 2 Upgrade Turbulence . Some generic cleanup tasks: @request/@params/etc are deprecated, drop the '@' everywhere. application.rb becomes application_controller.rb start_form_tag and end_form_tag are deprecated; use form_for instead. ActiveRecord associations have changed . Named routing has...

Here's a fairly common problem I've encountered. Say you have two classes; for example, a Restaurant and a Cuisine. They exist in a many-to-many relationship, and have associations defined like so: class Restaurant :delete_all has_many :cuisines, :through => :restaurant_cuisines end class Cuisine :delete_all has_many :rest...

I spent a few days of last week pursuing a novel activity: building a bicycle wheel. I followed Sheldon Brown's excellent wheelbuiding guide , and I've been quite pleased with the results. Thus far the wheel has been smooth and true, and I feel rather enlightened by the whole experience. This marked a milestone of sorts in...