Before starting a new project, take a look.

If you’re planning to start a new project, from scratch, Jim Neath, from Fudge, had the good idea to create Bort, your application skeleton to start without pain.

What is Bort ?

      Ruby on Rails popularity brings to it a lot of very good plugins. And it’s that, on 98 % case, when you start a new project from scratch, you’re going to do every times the same thing.

      From starting your test with Rspec to install the lastest version of RESTFUL Authentication, we do all the same thing every time.

      So Bort is just an easy to use starting point, like the scaffolds sometimes.

How can I play with it ?

      Open a terminal and clone Bort git repository : clone git://github.com/fudgestudios/bort.git  (or download it directly from the GitHub )

      Then a Rake db:migrate will do the magic.

What’s inside ?

      At this time, a Bort fresh installation come with :

1. RESTful Authentication and params
2. User Roles
3. Open ID Authentication
4. Will Paginate
5. Rspec & Rspec-rails
6. Exception Notifier
7. Asset Packager
8. Capistrano recipes

       A rake:bort:[plugin name] will help you to an easy install of some useful plugins.

How can you help ?

        On his blog, Jim Neath calls for developers ideas, so give a look and report bugs/ideas here

Rails Rumble 2008, I’ll participate

After long hesitation, I finally took a place for the Rails Rumble 2008.

What’s the Rails Rumble :

Basically, you have 48 Hours long to build from scratch a deployable Ruby on Rails web application.

Every team will have a virtual seat. The rumble starts on October 18th 2008 at 00:00 GMT and stops on October 19Th 2008 at 23:59 GMT.

Every team can have between 1 and 4 persons.

You’re not allowed to start coding/design before or after the 48 hours.

Your application will be judge during 10 days after the competition.

Who can participate :

Any Ruby on Rails developer with an idea to develop, all levels.

My Project :

I’ll try to have a complete Online Cv builder working.

My Rails Rumble project page is online, with the Sheep’n Geek team name.

If you have some reasonable ideas for it, I’ll take them to consideration

Sponsors and prizes :

You can find on the Rails Rumble blog all the sponsors names, with their contributions.

And now :

I have my day job, my travel planner project, and this contest … Ho, and our anniversary with my peanut. I’m going to be very busy.

Goog luck to all contestants.

Please, use a version control system, even if your work alone.

Currently, in my team, we are looking for a new junior web developer.

Each time it is the same process.

   1. Read the CV.
   2. First call to see if the person will be ok FOR the role.
   3. Second call with technical questions.

In these technical questions, one is : “Have your ever used a source versioning control system ?”

Easy, isn’t it ?

You’d be surprised with the responses we had :

   1. No never used before.
   2. Yes I’ve used Eclipse/Tortoise
   3. What is it ?
   4. No, never because I worked alone or because we were a small team

Come on, how can you imagine working on a project, even small and own project, without a version control system ?

Saving your code, diff capabilities, branches, tags, reverts, history …. can you code without this ?

To hard or you don’t have any server for that ?

Have a look at GitHub

You don’t need one, you work alone ?

So, you never make mistake, you’ve never modified a file and seen a hidden bug 1 week later, never copied and pasted a part of code in a text editor just in case it doesn’t work, never renamed a folder with the word ‘works/ok/test’ ?

If you can say yes to one or more of the behaviours above, you should take half a day to put your project under a version control system and learn how to use it.

If you want to learn more about version control system, smashing magazine made a presentation of 7 version control systems, just take a look.

At work, migration is in progress from CVS to SVN, and for my personal projects, I use Git on GitHub, very easy and very cheap.

What about you ? Do you use one ? Which one and why ?