When I first started learning Rails back in the day, it was my first introduction to Ruby: I was learning them both at the same time. As a result, the line between them was rather blurry; I didn’t know what was coming from Ruby, and what was coming from Rails. The Rails approach of monkey-patching Ruby didn’t help. If I’m being honest, I didn’t realize that Object#blank? wasn’t a Ruby method until only a few years ago....
My first foray into software development when I was a kid was as a web developer. I don’t admit this to many people, but the first language I ever learned halfway decently was PHP. I led a confused childhood. After that, though, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t do web development professionally anymore, but I have a number of web-based side projects, making websites for friends or family....
I think we can all agree that testing one’s Rails project is a good thing. I think we can also agree that those tests should be run on a regular basis (i.e. after every change). I think it’s a logical conclusion then that having a continuous integration environment setup for one’s project would be considered ideal. This is really pretty easy for open-source projects, since a number of companies provide free support for them....
When developing a new Ruby on Rails project, one doesn’t always start from scratch. Often one first searches for an open-source project that will at least get one part of the way there. For example, one might want to do something as simple a create a website with a blog as well as image galleries. The first step in this journey might be to find some open-source blog software for Rails, e....