Seeing your tests pass is a great feeling. Waiting a long time for it—not so much. Faster tests mean a happier developer! Use Parallel Tests If you’re not using parallel tests by Michael Grosser, you’re wasting time. Setup is just a few simple steps . You’ll be glad you did. ... Read more

The New York Times ran a popular Op-Ed on Happiness last year. The Cliff Notes version? The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. Many software developers are fortunate to have flexible ... Read more

We lost the browser state when we replaced our Charts UI w/AJAX manipulation . While it’s possible to maintain state using an anchor ala Gmail (ie – gmail.com/mail?#inbox/THREAD), it breaks the separation between business and view logic. The server cannot access the state information contained in the anchor – it’s ... Read more

Our knowledge at Scout is spread across web apps: Gmail, Basecamp, Delicious, Dropbox, and more. It’s become more cumbersome to find information as our pile of content has grown. We saw two options: devote more time to organizing our information or make it easier to search through it. Spending more ... Read more

Josh Nichols of Rails Machine has developed a Scout plugin for monitoring mod_pagespeed , Google's Apache 2.x module for performing on-the-fly optimization in the Apache 2 HTTP Server. mod_pagespeed has several filters that optimize a web page’s resources. These filters combine CSS files, optimize images, and more. mod_pagespeed is still ... Read more

There are no formal documents to sign if you and your spouse decide to have children. You don’t have to sit through an accreditation class. There is no credit check. You don’t need a high school diploma. Procreation can even happen accidentally. A baby is a lot like a Rails ... Read more

Years back, before Scout , I used to schedule deployments outside the regular workday. I didn’t give it much thought – it was what my consulting clients were used to. However, we changed that practice with Scout. Many web applications, including Scout, have customers around the world. There isn’t a ... Read more

When checking the amount of free memory on a Linux server, it’s easy to think you’re running out of memory when you’re not. For example, here’s the output of free -m on a server with 4GB of RAM : With a quick glance, you might start sweating. Only 39 MB ... Read more

A big part of providing good support is making it painless. At Scout , Andre and I handle all of the support requests. Once we’ve gathered the account information, it usually doesn’t take much time to help. The problem is quickly putting the account information together. We don’t want to ... Read more

UPDATED 6/7/2013 – We no longer recommend using bash -l -c to run Cron jobs with RVM . See our updated approach . This info is for Scout users, but it’s also applicable to anyone who’s wondered how to use cron together with RVM . This assumes 1) you are ... Read more