Did you ever tried to solve a problem of unified development environment? It’s hard. I mean - seriously. ‘It works on my machine’ - how many times did you heard that?

So you have Vagrant or Docker or maybe some other brand-new-solution. With Vagrant you basically build a whole VM environment, with Docker it’s another story (assuming you’re running linux).

Did you get to the point where your model is over 1k lines longs and moreover stuffed with various concerns? If so - maybe it’s time to think about extracting so called form models (Ruby/Rails community always have fancy names for most simple things :p).

What is a form model? It’s simply a Ruby class (d’oh) that encapsulates logic related to a single operation. Dead simple example that comes to mind is some kind of a sign up process that exists in almost every web application.

Problem

Build a vagrant development environment that will serve an rails application that works on multiple subdomains. Moreover that application consists of multiple smaller apps that all are running with a single domain.

Let’s talk about pretty tedious task - upgrading rails, of course it can be interesting experience, but if you have relatively large application to upgrade it can be cumbersome, here are my thoughts after doing through process of switching Rails 3.2 to Rails 4.1.

-> <-

Ruby is very pretty, and unfortunattely it can be very slow. Beautiful syntax and flexebility of this language has its price (well, it’s not so bad compared to other interpreted languages anyway).

Let’s go over few (totally random) things that might cause performance issues.

-> <-

When you’re running community-driven website sooner or later you will have to fight back spammers. There can be different kind of spammers, but the main question here is - how do we stop them from flooding your precious site?

I noticed that I ‘starred’ over 320 gems on rubygems.org. So I decided to do some cleanups there and while I’m at it - share with you few real gems that I like to use. So here it is - my tiny list that I called “My Gems of 2013”, mainly because it sounds catchy; a little bit of marketing didn’t killed anybody yet, I think.

I tried to avoid some, well, really obvious choices (like rspec, mocha, sidekiq, devise, resque, carrierwave, etc. - you get the idea) so maybe you fill find that one precious, very special thing that you will love ;-). Here we go.