Why Coding Guidelines Don’t Matter

I’ve been on a lot of projects, where people put an awful lot of time into coming up with the right coding style. Everyone of course wants to have his knack for a certain way of doing things included: “I want my opening curly brace at the end of the line.” Or: “A single space between if and the following opening brace.”

Migrating a Project to use Rails UTC-based Migrations

A confusing title, I know. But I recently upgraded a rather big project to use Rails 2.1. Everything went pretty smoothly, but one thing bugged me, since it’s not really documented anywhere: What happens if you migrate from the old numbered migration scheme to the new one using UTC timestamps?

Git Bits: Renaming with Lowercase and Uppercase

There’s a small pitfall when using git-svn. I just recently had the problem that someone renamed a file from lowercase to uppercase in our Subversion repository. Why should that bother me, when I’m using Git, you ask? Well, I’m using git-svn, and it didn’t really like that kind of change. The default on Mac OS X file systems is that they are case-insensitive. FFFFFF.gif is the same as ffffff.gif.

Spring’s New Maintenance Policy

If Rails was anything like Spring, we wouldn’t see a 2.1.2 release anymore:

“After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues. Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers. Bug fixes will be folded into the open source development trunk and will be made available in the next major community release of the software . . . “

Right on. I can understand that SpringSource has to make money somehow, but way to screw over the community like that. But given the enormous amounts of money put into it by investors it’s no surprise really.

Via TheServerSide.