Zach Inglis

Quick Note

I lost my feed when MediaTemple rudely shut my blog down and I moved to Tumblr. I have just managed to claim my Feedburner URL again, so thanks to the few that stuck around.

RailsRumble Picks ‘09

I was randomly assigned a group of Rails Rumble entries to judge this year. I’d like to call out my favourites of the ones I’ve judged. I’m looking forward to seeing the full list after I judge.

In no perticular order, my favourites are:

• Tablesurfing
• Bartender Cocktail Recipies
• omnominator
• Heart On

Judging Rails Rumble

So after doing having the great honour of doing the preliminary design for Rails Rumble, It has just been announced that I am joining some amazing people and judging Rails Rumble aswell. It’s a great privallage and I look forward to judging your apps.

Minor Suggestion: Unless.nil? - Down with double negatives

This is a very small tip aimed for people to clean up their code-base and remove some of the double negatives.

Often I shall see:

unless @user.nil?

The issue with this is approach is that unless is harder to read than if, then you have to mentally process the #nil?

The other approach is:

if @user

However, for a lot of people this is not explicit enough. I find that too few know about #present? method


if @user.present?

#present? is literally the opposite of #blank? and thus checks if it is not nil? or if it is not empty?

Hopefully with this small tidbit of knowledge, you can clean up your code and make it easier to read.

Deploying Thinking Sphinx with Capistrano.

I’ve had a lot of issues trying to deploy ThinkingSphinx with Capistrano. This has been for a multitude of reasons. The following is my recipe for deploying and hopefully making it public will make a few peoples lives easier.

This assumes you are using the plugin, not the gem.

In your deploy.rb, add the following at the top:

require 'vendor/plugins/thinking-sphinx/lib/thinking_sphinx/deploy/capistrano'

Then, at the bottom add this:

before "deploy:rollback:revision",  "thinking_sphinx:stop_gracefully"
after  "deploy:default",            "thinking_sphinx:symlink"
after  "deploy:default",            "thinking_sphinx:ready"
namespace :thinking_sphinx do
  task :stop_gracefully do
    begin
      thinking_sphinx.stop
    rescue
      puts "ThinkingSphinx is not running. No stop required."
    end
  end

  desc "Configure, Index and then run Thinking Sphinx"
  task :ready do
    thinking_sphinx.configure
    thinking_sphinx.index
    thinking_sphinx.start
  end

  desc "Link up Sphinx's indexes."
  task :symlink do
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/db/sphinx #{release_path}/db/sphinx"
  end
end

Don’t Accept Doing Anything But Your Best

Now this may seem vulagrly blatent, but I have been mulling over past jobs the last few days. I realised that I did myself no favours by being constantly belevonant. When I was asked to “Complete a design in 2 days” or such, I would say jump at the oppurtunity to prove myself or to try and help out in any way I can. Now I realised, by rushing the design work, my performance was lackluster and the results were not of that I was proud of. I was proud that I got the work out, but it was forgettable and obviously, you don’t ever want your work to ever be forgettable.

If your boss ever says “Can you do me a design in 3 days”, mostly I think the correct answer should be “No”, unless it’s a once off request. To be utilised as an average designer, will earn you that position and make you despensable, leaving little reward. It’s a mistake I shall try not to make again in the future, to only put out my best work and not accept putting out anything but that.