Imagine you've got a blogging app and it's currently generating URL paths like posts/10 for individual posts. You decide the path should contain the post title (in some form) to make your URLs friendlier when someone reads them. I know I certainly prefer to read http://caiustheory.com/abusing-ruby-19-and-json-for-fun vs http://caiustheory.com/?id=70. (That's a fun blog post if you're into (ab)using ruby occasionally!)

At the 2009 Barcamp Leeds I attended a talk by Neil Crosby where he talked about automated testing, and about how he felt there was a gap in everything that people were testing. Everyone has unit tests, and people are doing full stack testing too, but no-one (so he feels) does XHTML/CSS/JS validation as part of their automated test suite. ...

I happened to be sent a link to the OWASP paper on Rails Security recently and started reading it. Partway in there's a section on Regular Expressions, which opens with the following line:

So, I keep having to reinstall mysql5 and rubygems from time to time for various reasons. I always install mysql5 through MacPorts as a dependency for the php5 port (along with various other bits for the LA*P stack).

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, ...