RailsConf Europe is a sell-out

Yep. It’s sold out. Compared to the RailsConf in Portland it took a while, but now you can expect to meet something around 800 people there. I’m really looking forward to it, as well as Bratwurst on Rails which will be doing pretty good as well regarding participants.

ActiveRecord and a custom method_missing

Don’‘t be tempted to overwrite method_missing in an ActiveRecord-based model class. It will open a can of worms that’s hard to close without removing your custom version again.

Film is the new Black

Okay, maybe that statement is a slight exaggeration. I started getting into photography about a year ago, and that was mainly thanks to my girlfriends diploma thesis. I started with a simple point & shoot, but it soon gets annoying to be held back by its restrictions, especially when there’s a Nikon D80 in the same household.

IDEA still makes Java Fun

Since I’ve started freelancing I worked less and less in a Java environment. Which is quite a good thing for me, since I get to do what I enjoy. I worked in a J2EE environment for three years. Though I never got to feel the pain of using entity beans, I still started loathing it over time. It just felt too heavy-weight. Testing is a pain, deployment takes ages, and it just can get frustrating what with all the waiting and the complexity involved.

Increase Productivity by Reducing Distractions

I get distracted easily. E-mail, instant messaging, the mighty and fraudulent web, you name it. However, recently I’ve surrounded my workspace with a couple of tools that help me reduce distractions, both explicitly and implicitly.