Dan Ahern

Rails Rumble was an amazing experience.  I think I slept about 6 hours over a 56 hour period and while I became grouchy I don’t think I ever stopped having fun.  The fun stopped after the first day of voting.  Starting during the second day of voting I <3 Games plummeted in the rankings.  I [...]

So in preparation for Rails Rumble I’ve been researching a lot of sexy little plugins.  We have also had a need to test this plugins to make sure they’ll work not just locally but in a shared hosting environment (the first time you get burned and spend an entire weekend, 16 hours, trying to figure [...]

Powered By Geek will be participating in Rails Rumble 08.
I’ll be working along side Lynn Wallenstein, Nathan Ostgard and William Harris to create a Rails application in 48 hours.  We’re super excited, and I’m going to try and keep a log of what is going on to post it (we’ll see how well that goes).

Recently I was asked to look into doing some customizations for the Mephisto blog for a customer.  I figured “well it’s Rails, and I know rails, so sure I could do it”.  However, thirty minutes after opening up the code I decided that Mephisto is no longer really a Rails application.  I know I’m going [...]

This app was tricky in two ways. First it was the first real Facebook app I have done, which meant there was a large learning curve as things that work just fine with a regular Rails site some times just don’t work with Facebook. Ajax and JavaScript in particular are completely different, and require [...]

So after a good long while in development and being kept under wraps I’m finally able to write about the newest big project I’ve been a part of, Kiobo.  Kiobo’s goal is:
Kiobo helps users enrich their browsing experience by making browsing a more social activity. We enable users to explore and leverage their social graph’s [...]

Beginner mistake number 3:
Associations.  If you’ve worked with relational databases at all you probably know the concepts one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many, and you’ve probably cried your self to sleep on a numerous occasions writing join statements that probably are longer than some children’s books.  Every Rails developers learns the basics of Rail’s model associations.
class User [...]

Beginner mistake number 2:
Names and idioms. One thing I learned about the Rails community is that all the good developers secretly wish that they were English majors and Math majors at the same time. I know it sounds silly, but Ruby devs will call you down for using a crazy model name while [...]

Starting off as a Rails developer I ran into some problems coming from a Java/C++ background. Until Rails I more learned the languages for fun and something to play with in my free time, however by doing this I picked up some bad habits. I’ve worked with one of the top Ruby developers out there [...]