Fear of Fish

We've been increasing our workforce dramatically at Engine Yard over the past month or two, and having recently been promoted to 'App Support Manager, EU' I'm on the look out for talented Ruby on Rails developers and general Linux Sys Admin gurus.

For App Support I'm looking for the following (in priority order):

The App Support Engineers are responsible for deploying customers applications, maintaining the slices they reside on, interacting with customers and making sure they're happy, and working on automation tools to increase productivity.

• Good customer service attitude
• Availability in the GMT hours
• Rails
• Ruby
• Nginx
• Mongrel
• MySQL
• Monit
• Gentoo Linux (packaging experience with other distros a +)
• Xen

For a Sysadmin:

The Sysadmins are responsbile for maintaining the low level Linux, Xen, LVM, and networking pieces of our setup. The ability to speak in binary is always a plus, but not necessary, we have experts who can do that already!

• Good customer service attitude
• Availability in the GMT hours
• Gentoo Linux (packaging experience with other distros a +)
• Xen
• LVM (CLVM is a +)
• LVS (Linux Virtual Server)
• Shell scripting (Bash is best)
• iptables
• CoRAID (http://coraid.com)
• RedHat Cluster Suite
• Working knowledge of TCP/IP
• Working knowledge of DNS
• TinyDNS (aka djbdns)
• Exim
• nginx
• apache
• MySql
• Postgres
• Python
• Ruby

Let me know which pieces of the puzzle you have and which you don't, and why you think you would be a fantastic addition to the Engine Yard team. You'll love working here, I promise!

Contact me at jvandyke - at - engineyard.com

Everyone in the Leeds area, or those who want to visit, head on over to the Official BarCamp Leeds page and get signed up, I might attend, depending on whether or not I'm training or not. Update to come next week.

As you may have seen on the Riding Rails article, I got a thanks for the patches I added for documentation and other bits and bobs. I'd just like to extend that thanks out to everyone in the Caboose Documentation Project (who were also mentioned) and everyone who donated to the fund. You guys are chuffing great. :-D

More patches to come...once I get the Scalability Course written and Engine Yard get more staff!

I was recently interviewed by Satish Talim for Ruby Learning, it was a pleasure being among the 13 that were published, others included Jamie Buck and Ola Bini and more.

Check out the article here: http://rubylearning.com/blog/2007/09/27/advice-for-ruby-beginners-1/

It's that time of year again, and I'm setting off to Berlin today for RailsConf Europe because Engine Yard are sponsors of the event. So for all of those going, come over to the Engine Yard booth and meet up because we'd love to hear feedback you have and any questions you want to fire at us. It's looking like it might turn out to be a pretty schweet event this year!

Oh, and catch us early and you might get one of our highly sought after Engine Yard t-shirts! ;-)

It's been a while since I did a Ruby post, so I thought I'd fire out a simple task I just made for a customer. He wanted to be told when he hadn't committed changes to his svn repository when deploying his application. So I fired out this very simple task that merely exits if he didn't, the beauty of Capistrano (1.4.1 for this):

task :before_deploy do
  synced?
end

desc "Check local changes have been committed to the svn repository"
task :synced?, :roles => :app do
  output = `svn status`
  unless output.empty?
    puts "PLEASE COMMIT YOUR SVN CHANGES"
    exit(0)
  end
end

Simple, but effective.

I've had a project sat 'almost done' for so long now, I can't remember what needs doing, and the todo list has gone walkabout, so I think it's time to just deploy it and see what happens.

External link to the site=> Get Me Started

The idea behind the site is that you put your tutorials for learning a language in one place, and that's where everyone goes when they think "Oooh, shall I learn X". The site will have many languages, each will allow the user to add an article on installing that language, making your first program in that language, and where to go next on the net and at the bookstore.

I've added Ruby on Rails to the language list, a few others I enjoy playing with and of course the more popular ones. Let me know what you think...if it is successful at all, then I'll improve it a chunk. So far it's the work of myself, Jeremy McAnally and Cristi Bălan.

There is a lack of content at the moment, but it's a community driven site, so if you want to see something there, please sign up and get your content on.

A side note: I've added a referral id to the books that get added, because the site has to make a revenue and I didn't want ads. If you think that lessens the impact of the reviews for any part of the site, think again. The referral fees on the books pay for the site and further development, but I don't add them so the strength of the review is still there. Also, the ratings on the books are done from Amazon, so I don't change them to sell more.

Have a play, let me know what you think.

I've been working on a set of tools for the Cheese Private Servers soon to be available (actually they're already available to a few select guinnea pigs), and I thought I'd screencast the functionality as it stands.

Cheese can:

• Add nginx virtual hosts
• Replace nginx virtual hosts
• Remove nginx virtual hosts
• Create subversion repositories
• Remove subversion repositories
• Set access rights on subversion repositories
• Create mysql/pgsql databases
• Delete mysql/pgsql databases
• Add a pre-configured mongrel_cluster.yml file to your subversion repos

Cheese Tools will be able to:

• Configure monit to watch your sites and svnserve
• Configure a scheduled backup of your sites and source to s3
• Install all of the managed applications
• Do all this remotely

So without further ado, here's the screencast:

Download link

You can check out the source code, as I've made this available under the MIT license by running this command:

svn co svn://fearofcheese.co.uk/cheese-tools

Update:

This is now available as a gem, docs are here: http://cheese.rubyforge.org/cheese/, it might take a while to propogate all the mirrors though, so be patient or download the gem directly from rubyforge.

No comments on the lack of tests, this was serious hackware until recently and has been put together in a short space of time and isn't ready for release yet, but with the requests for the tools I thought I'd release them anyway. Bear in mind that the code is in flux right now, so it may break regularly.

If you have any improvements you'd like to add please do send me patches...I'd wait till the test suite is in place first though.

Coming soon, a UK Xen-Based VPS hosting company with a twist of Cheese. I noticed there seemed to be a serious lack in Rails specific services in the UK that offered the size of memory we need for hosting more than one site. So I came up with a plan which would fulfil that hole. Here's the plan:

Cheddar

256 Mb Memory + 20 Gb Storage + 20 Gb Bandwidth = £20 a month

Wensleydale

512 Mb Memory + 30 Gb Storage + 40 Gb Bandwidth = £30 a month

Stilton

1024 Mb Memory + 50 Gb Storage + 75 Gb Bandwidth = £40 a month

...and to top it off, I host your mail services on a separate VCS (that's Virtual Cheesey Server) to save your memory.

I'm working on the web site and client tools as we speak, you'll be able to wipe your machine and start again at the click of a button at no charge. Reboot it with a web button etc. All the usual you'd expect from someone who's written remote xen management tools in Ruby. We'll also be offering some enterprisey packages further down the line, but for now this is your pick of the cheese.

Using the plan names, can you guess the name of the company? It's very cheesey, for lack of a better term.

Fear of Cheese

I'd like to apologise to the vast majority of those who were keeping an eye on the Caboose Documentation Project Basecamp Project, we've had to remove public access...this is mostly due (we think) to one disturbed individual who decided to tick off all our todos repeatedly (we unticked them) so we would lose track of where we were.

There is another publicly viewable site in the works (we're using it right now but we can't say where/what it is, it's still beta...as of tomorrow that is) but it's looking like a great alternative. More news on that to come.

In case you don't read the caboose blog I'd like to point you to the new basecamp project we created for the doc project. You can log in at the link below with the details given:

caboose basecamp site

• user: guest
• password: guest

Please don't abuse the user given, it's provided so the rails community can give us feedback and pointers.

Thanks.

So, I start documenting for the Caboose Documentation Project on monday and wondered if anyone had any preference as to what I should document first? What's the most severely lacking part of the rails source code you think? If there aren't any suggestions I'll just be starting from the top and working down, alphabetically. Of course, as suggestions/requests come in I'll gladly divert from the stage I'm at if it warrants it.

Anyway, comments are appreciated. I'll give my full plan after the weekend, I have a Barcamp London 2 conference to attend.

Also, on a side note the caboose blog is back up.

As my current project for New Bamboo Web Development is coming to a close, I thought I'd let you all know I'm available for freelance or project work from the 19th February, let me know what you need, when you need it and I'm sure I can accommodate you. If you'd like to query the quality of my work feel free to get in touch with them through the contact address on their site.

On a side note it was a pleasure freelancing for New Bamboo on their last couple of projects, and look forward to working with them in the future.

Cheers.

I've noticed a lot of people asking questions about ajax, rjs, scriptaculous and other whizzy cool effects lately. So I thought I'd document a couple here so there's less confusion about some of the simpler effects. I've included an element toggle on a hyper link, a simple div that updates with data from an action using link_to_remote, and others. Enjoy.

You'll learn effects like these: Video of ajax effects

I put together (almost should I say, it needs completing) a handout for a training session I did down in London recently, and would like to offer it out as a helping hand to those new to Ruby on Rails. I had a chunk of help structuring it from David Black, and shall therefore plug his book as a recommendation: Ruby for Rails.

The handout covers the basics of Ruby as well as Rails, and I hope it helps more people get into the framework quicker than had they not had it, or hadn't read anything, or...um, here's the handout:

Download link: Introduction to Rails Handout