Week 3

Two weeks worth of updates today.

Three consulting gigs ongoing: Ruby on Rails work, an architecture/performance review and finally some work on a OSGi SaaS platform. Definitely busy times!

I started to collect some Ruby and Rails code snippets (and some wiki pages of explanation) at https://github.com/fdiotalevi/rails-dump. Nothing polished, just some code to copy in my next project, or step-by-step tutorials to remember certain solutions. Some things I posted there:

• an improved standard layout for Rails projects (the default one is ugly)
• a reusable module to create wizard controllers
• how to setup Devise using mongoid as ORM (and MongoDB, of course)

For my traditional Sunday project, I decided to write a minimal blog engine in Ruby. I'm definitely sick of the terrible service offered by my current hosting provider (Servage), and have always played with the idea of writing something simple I can customise to my needs.

After getting the final inspiration looking at Toto and Marley, I wrote a minimal Sinatra-based (and Git backed) blog engine in 4 hours last Sunday. Deployed on Heroku, it's a 0-cost solution (because you can deploy it using the free plan), runs on a fast server and it's a completely customisable blog. I need some more time to add a couple of other features (in particular, a RSS feed), but it's already deployed here.

Finally, I started to define my idea for the Bruxelles Startup Weekend. It's one of my many ideas to improve the way people travel... more details in a few days.