When I create a new rails app, I'm constantly going back to another project and stealing the .gitignore file from it to make sure that git doesn't know about certain files rails either updates frequently, or stores machine-specific data in. The latter is generally just config/database.yml, because I develop alongside my colleagues at Brightbox and we deploy via capistrano, ...

When I create a rails app from scratch I like to include certain plugins to help me write the app, such as the Rspec testing framework instead of the built-in Test::Unit and jQuery instead of prototype.

Back in the day I swapped the keys on my 12" powerbook keyboard around to read macgenius across the middle row.

This is just another example showing how I refactor code down to its bare minimum. The reason why I do this so much (and indeed I think why ruby is so easy to read compared to other languages) is because it makes my code more readable and less of a bugger to pick up after a while.