I just found out that if you need to write a long number in Ruby, you can use underscores instead of commas. For example, you could write one million like this:

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1_000_000

I find this a lot more readable than:

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1000000

Pretty nifty.

As you all know by now, Google Reader is shutting down. I use it to keep up with blogs, and I prefer RSS to getting all my blogs via email. My inbox is clogged enough as it is.

So, what to do?

What if you need to find all the duplicate rows in a Postgres table containing people? This can be a little difficult, especially if you have separate first_name and last_name fields. TLDR; Here’s a query you can use below:

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SELECT first_name, last_name
FROM people
WHERE CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) IN (SELECT CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) AS fullname FROM people)
GROUP BY last_name, first_name
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1
ORDER BY last_name DESC

As you scale software, it becomes less acceptable for your site to be down or slow after you roll out a change. And yet, your app generally needs to reboot after you push your change, and depending on the size of your stack, this could take a while.

I ran into this problem in my work and here’s how I solved it. Or at least part of it.

Google offers a “free” service called Google Voice. It allows you to:

• Route a single number to multiple numbers. If you change cell phones, you can just route your voice number differently, no need to tell all your friends.
• Get transcripted voicemails
• Block numbers

This is great. I currently use it. However, with freak legislation like CISPA on the horizon, it’s starting to look a little less wise to trust Google with all that data.

A while back, there was a poll of Ruby developers asking what their primary text editor was for Ruby on Rails. The results surprised me.

As a developer who has written a few APIs, and not the greatest ones either, I thought it was about time I recorded the things I’ve learned from maintaining APIs in the wild.

Great, you forked a project on Github! Now what?

You need to automatically test your code. This is the first step toward having any kind of quality assurance when multiple people start committing to your codebase.

In this part of my “Managing Long Projects” series, we’re going to take a look at automated systems to help you track down bugs in production.