http://guides.rubyonrails.org/2_3_release_notes.html

There's a lot of great new features coming in Rails 2.3, many of which have a direct effect on our group.

After some versions without an upgrade, Rails 2.3 offers some new features for Rails Engines (Rails applications that can be embedded within other applications). First, routing files in engines are automatically loaded and reloaded now, just like your routes.rb file (this also applies to routing files in other plugins). Second, if your plugin has an app folder, then app/[models|controllers|helpers] will automatically be added to the Rails load path. Engines also support adding view paths now.

Nice!

Turning on nested attributes enables a number of things: automatic (and atomic) saving of a record together with its associated children, child-aware validations, and support for nested forms (discussed later).

That will definitely come in handy for a number of our projects.

There are a couple of significant routing changes in Rails 2.3. The formatted_ route helpers are gone, in favor just passing in :format as an option. This cuts down the route generation process by 50% for any resource - and can save a substantial amount of memory (up to 100MB on large applications). If your code uses the formatted_ helpers, it will still work for the time being - but that behavior is deprecated and your application will be more efficient if you rewrite those routes using the new standard.

We make extensive use of the 'formatted_' helpers, so we'll have a bunch to update here. Saving memory is always good

Here's a couple other links to check out:

http://railscasts.com/episodes/148-app-templates-in-rails-2-3

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2009/2/6/this-week-in-edge-rails

http://www.railsinside.com/news/222-rails-23-release-candidate-1-released-whats-new.html

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2009/2/1/rails-2-3-0-rc1-templates-engines-rack-metal-much-more

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/2009/2/4/rails-guides-gets-a-facelift

I was having an issue with my svn certs because the ssl cert we were using had expired. We got a new one but for some reason every time I used svn I had to accept the new cert over and over again. It would never resave the new one. Not fun especially when you are using textmate's built in svn control system. It just won't work if you haven't accepted the cert via terminal first. It's been driving me nuts but I finally got my macbook to accept the new cert.

Here's what I did:

cd ~/.subversion/auth/

Within that directory there are three subdirectories that contain the auth keys for the svn sites you have used in the past. You can open these up in the editor of your choice and simply view them to see which ones go with each site as it will not be readily available by the file name. Just delete the ones that are for the domain you have the new cert.

Go back and use svn again accept the cert (p)ermanately and your set.

• To get query caching to work in console you have to put your code between code blocks.
  
Person.cache do
Person.find(1)
Person.find(1)
end
• You no longer have to do this to cache associations. Rails does that by default now.

I exchanged a few emails with John Kosner last night about my opinions on the best way for ESPN to utilize Twitter. Here were the points I sent over:

• Build relationships. We can’t simply treat Twitter like another RSS feed. The whole point is to associate with fans on Twitter. I imagine clickthroughs back to the site will greatly increase if Twitter users know they are speaking to an actual person.
• Related to building relationships, focus on replying to other users’ tweets.
• Also related to building relationships, retweet interesting sports posts from other Twitter users. Retweeting is a great way to make contacts. Tim O’Reilly does it all the time.
• Limit tweets to a handful a day. This will make it an event that users look forward to each day.
• Promote highlighted blog posts from ESPN Profiles (or in the case of the main site, highlighted articles/videos).
• Have fun features, like a weekly poll. Polls are incredibly popular on twitter and if we also linked back to the real poll, we could increase traffic to that section of the site.
• Another fun feature would be a “Topic of the Week”, asking users to post replies to various topics.
• Promote our Twitter account from the site! Easiest way to increase followers rapidly.
• Use Twitter to manage some User Feedback (there’s been a ton of tweets about the new redesign...)

Obviously it goes without saying that Twitter is about building relationships. But if ESPN were able to establish a core group of followers, traffic to the main site would increase tremendously. Those followers would be more likely to clickthrough links. In addition, they'd be more likely to retweet links, which would hopefully send their followers back to ESPN.com. I'm going to start putting this plan to work soon. Keep an eye out for the two Twitter accounts I'll be using!

merckens (personal)

espndev (work)

Dary

http://sportsnation.espn.go.com/dary.merckens

http://twitter.com/merckens

It was announced just before Christmas that Merb and Rails will be merging as of Rails 3.0. This is big news for the Rails community as Merb does a bunch of things better than Rails does. There will be a bunch of performance optimizations coming over. They're looking at RailsConf '09 for a beta release (Vegas, baby, Vegas!) With Rails 2.3 coming in the not too distant (loaded with goodies I've been assured) the Rails future is looking brighter and brighter

On a side note, I walked my roommate through building a Rails app this weekend and it was cool to see how amazed he was at the power and functionality you get with Rails. It was like watching a kid at Christmas when he first sees the bounty of presents under the tree that Santa left for him. Sometimes you forget just how awesome Rails is!

Dary

http://twitter.com/merckens

We haven't updated things here in a while due to the holiday season. But, we're back and ready to go in the new year!

Last year was great and 2009 is looking to be even better for the ESPN Community development team. We're working hard on many new things and can't wait to get them out there in the wild.

In a recent article on TechCrunch about Agile Methodologies, the Comment Wall quickly became a flame war with such pithy commentary as "Agile is a load of ****." I've posted a couple times on what I like about Agile and what I don't like. A lot of people in the comments section complained that Agile was just management jargon. But a lot of people said Agile was the bee's knees because up-front planning sets you up for failure if some unforeseen disaster strikes, like say the U.S. Economy's horrendousness. I find myself in the middle. I love Agile's short iterations and its focus on scope. But too often Agile is held aloft as a panacea that teams can use to immediately begin producing perfect code in half the time; that just hasn't been our experience.

Dary

http://twitter.com/merckens

There was a time in America, when you started your company to meet the needs of the local community. And the local community supported you, and then came the train, which allowed people to travel and shop and see other products that were similar to the local product, now your competition became your community and the other communities in which the people could travel. People could now travel or have there product shipped by train.

 As you know it didn’t stop they’re as the advent of cars, airplanes and of course the television, your competition began to expand to include all of America. You could have your product shown all across America, and possible the world, television products however, were really only shown in the country that was airing the program.

 Now comes the Internet that is truly viewed globally.  Giving startups a greater opportunity to connect to more people.

 So what does that mean, it means that you as a small business leader have to know the needs of your customers and who your customers are. So that you can tailor your product to fit the needs of all of your customers with their very diverse lifestyles and living environments.

 Your company must diversify more than companies in previous times, this will allow your company to be less acceptable to the ups and down of the markets in any one country.

We here at the Community group are in the process of writing dozens of tickets for the next 3 month period. We're covering all of the exciting new products and features we're planning on launching in that time period. And even though it's a little bit of a slog to get through them, at the end we're going to have an amazing backlog and our iterations are going to be worlds more efficient and gratifying. Plus, we're getting experience writing useful user stories.

User stories are one of the key aspects of Agile Methodologies. The goal of User Stories is to describe functionality of your application and its value for users or product owners. Since we work with RSpec and Cucumber, our user stories are all of the format:

As a ______

I want to ______

So that ______

This helps us capture who the feature is for, what they want to do, and why it's important for this feature to be implemented. Working with these stories will allow us to not only prioritize all of our tickets for our upcoming iterations, but it will constantly remind us why we wrote the stories in the first place.

Watch out over the coming months for awesome new stuff from the Community group!

There use to be a time when an entrepreneur only had to have an good idea, and then people who were called VC, or Angles would come to you with money in hand wanting to invest, in what they considered the “Next Big Thing”.

 Well my friend, times are a changing, now with Banks going out of business or being bought out, and the stock market is going south, today’s entrepreneur has to have a solid business plan, marketing plan, profit projection and perfect credit to even be considered for a loan from a banking institution. 

Times like these help us to define our idea’s, and to gain a better focus of the task at hand. It divides those who have a get rich quick idea from those who have a great product.

But the question still remains, “Where or how do we get funding?”

Well, it is not easy but you must return to the old school entrepreneur style, and began to sell your idea to anyone who will listen, you must become a salesman, if you believe in your idea and truly have a passion about your product then you must convince other's of your products greatness, and if your not a salesman type then convince one person who is, and allow him or her to sell your product. 

It will be hard! And it will seem like it is all uphill but it can be done and has been done many times. 

This is not reinventing the wheel, it is more like returning to the basic.