Crumble - Breadcrumbs for Rails Applications

I recently had to improve the breadcrumbs situation on one of my projects. Until now, breadcrumb definition were sprinkled across the controllers. While that was okay for a while, the current breadcrumbs have become a bit more complex, and I wanted to get them out of the controllers. One option would’ve been to put them into the model, but seriously, who does that? Plus, I have a lot of breadcrumbs that are not exactly related to a model, and if they are, it’s not always an ActiveRecord model.

RailsWayCon Slides

I’m having a great time at RailsWayCon in Berlin. The line-up of speakers is pretty neat, and even though the venue has some flaws, it’s still a cool conference. I’m glad it’s also in Berlin.

RailsWayCon in Berlin

Next week I’ll attend and speak at the RailsWayCon conference in Berlin. You can see me speak at the tutorial “Deploying Rails Applications”, together with Jonathan Weiss, and talk about asynchronous processing in Rails applications. The line-up looks pretty good. See you there!

A Ruby Meta-Programming Riddle

When we were at Scotland on Rails (excellent conference by the way, you should definitely go), and we sat in Dave Thomas’ keynote, where he talked about the “Ruby Object Model”, funnily enough we ran across a meta-programming wonder in that very session. It has been keeping me busy for a couple of hours, and I’d like to share my revelations. With some of them I’m not completely in the clear, but maybe they’ll be a start for discussion. It’s more a tale of one of my adventure through the Ruby object model than a fancy tutorial, so if you’re up for that kind of thing, keep going. If not, just keep on reading.

Ruby 1.9 Upgrading Woes

Actually, not so much woes, as general musings. I just finished upgrading a project I’ve been maintaining for the last 15 months or so to Ruby 1.9, and I thought I’d share some of my experiences with the process. Looking back it wasn’t so hard after all, but there were some pitfalls.