I work on a lot of little side projects. Many of them are short-lived and small scale. I start them to learn a new technology, to learn a new concept, try an idea, or just to see if I can actually build something cool. I should also mention that my memory is terrible. I “remember” things by figuring them out again. Rote memorization is basically non-existent to me. I’ve recently come up with a new best practice for my side projects which has saved my butt several times now.

How To Self-Reference

When working on projects with multiple developers following a feature branching workflow, you can end up with a lot of branch laying around. I’ve been trying to optimize my branch cleanup workflow for a while now and had a big breakthrough recently. UPDATE: I now use a shell script which has the meat of the git-sweep functionality. Thanks to @pengwynn for letting me steal that. Before we get to that, I must mention git-sweep.

git Self-Reference

I was getting this error and the excellent Zeus rails environment loader gemwas crashing making it a huge bummer to dev. Luckily, I found a fix in one of the open issues on the project. It was easy to fix, just run a bundle install to add the missing gems: Easy as that. Hope this helps someone else! – Chris

How-To Self-Reference

This is an account of my adventure with delegation from problem to apparent solution to bug in ActiveSupport to you’re doing it wrong!

How-To Ruby On Rails Self-Reference

Not knowing perl, I set out to write my own script in Ruby to send auto-responses from e-mail addresses setup in a vmail folder structure. You don’t need to use postfix, just have the ‘new’ folder where new messages are stored.

How-To Self-Reference

The Ubuntu Blog has a nice lil' article about keeping SSH sessions alive It basically boils down to editing your /etc/ssh/ssh_config file and adding the following: # /etc/ssh/ssh_config ServerAliveInterval 5 The number is the number of seconds to send the small keep alive which keeps the connection open. Ubuntu Blog suggests changing it from 5 to 240 or 300 (4 or 5 minutes). – Chris

How-To Self-Reference

PianoBar is a console client for Pandora Internet Radio. For me, this is a huge discovery. If you run Ubuntu, the flash player for Pandora can be a pain in the ass to install. Plus, on my netbook, the flash plugin for Chrome usually eats about 40-55% CPU constantly. A console client for Pandora will resolve all these issues.

How-To Self-Reference

Before I start talking about colors, let’s talk font. Consolas. That’s all you need to know. By far the best programming font. Get it. Use it. Love it.

How-To Self-Reference