Half a Mind

Inspired by the post Every line of code is always documented, I upgraded my development environment with a few new tools:

• GitCommitMsg plug-in for Sublime Text - provides easy access to the entire commit history for selected lines.

Solid tests are a great asset. Tests that fail spuriously are toxic; they threaten our ability to ship quickly and our confidence in the end product.

We at Artsy have been experimenting with a test “quarantine”–a suite of problematic tests that’s isolated from the usual build pipeline and limited in size.

Who hasn’t mistakenly typed into a production Rails console thinking it was development?

Introducing console_color, so you’re never unsure of your environment. To install, add console_color to your Gemfile:

After struggling to make Artsy’s largest application work within Heroku’s platform for a long while, I began a series of experiments with other providers. Recently, those experiments culminated in switching our application to AWS OpsWorks.

In a MongoDB shell, the db.stats() command shows you the amount of space occupied by the selected database.

> db.stats()
{
  "db" : "my-db",
  "collections" : 242,
  "dataSize" : 7167367172,

When I switched from halfamind.aghion.com to the more personal joey.aghion.com for this site, I needed a way to permanently redirect all requests for the old hostname to the new one. Github pages (where this is hosted) only supports a single hostname and doesn’t allow for redirects. You could redirect in javascript or with a meta-tag, but I wanted to guarantee that search engines would respect the new location.

I’m still using TextMate 1, since 2.0 has been buggy for me. If you’re in the same boat, you might share my frustration with the recurring lag that TextMate experiences when switching focus between applications. TextMate tries to reload the entire project’s file state on focus, and this can be noticeably slow.

I don’t make an effort to remember URLs, so often I type the name of a site into the Chrome location bar, hit enter, and then immediately click on the first search result to navigate to the site. There’s at least one unnecessary click in there, so…

My project for Artsy’s first hackathon: Artsy Timelines.

Posterous is shutting down, so I was finally forced to figure out a better blogging solution. Since my day job revolves around building and maintaining dynamic sites, that was exactly what I didn’t want for my personal site. Enter Middleman, the super-simple static site engine. Best of all, it uses a toolchain that’s very familiar to Ruby developers.