GitHub's amazing UX

I was explaining to a colleague of mine how he can host his static website on GitHub for free. He was super happy about this, so to get him started I shared the help page that he could follow.

100DaysOfCommits

Of all the innovative ideas to bring more people into open source, this has got to take the prize. #100DaysOfCommits is a social movement to promote open source development. All you need to do is commit on Github, to an open source project of your choice for the next 100 days! 1 commit (or more, common challenge yourself!) per day.

Offsetting Ruby Time

Managing local time is such a huge challenge when making webapps. There’s always going to be users from all over the world clocking in on different timezones. Basecamp’s local_time solves this problem in a elegant way – it doesn’t care how you store timezone, it interprets the users local time and prints it out on the view accordingly.

But, all hell breaks loose when you try to recreate this on the server side. Here there’s no information on what user is from what timezone. And even if you persist the users timezone information, surprisingly Rails doesn’t come with an out of the box solution to offseting time(s).

Scheduling Backup Jobs With Crontab

Backup is an insanely useful gem for, well backups. I use it in production all the time. It can run independent of your Rails app, which in in production can be quite helpful. I’m going to skip ahead and assume your Backup jobs are already set.

Useful Imagemagick Commands

Imagemagick is one of those tools that’s there on literally every developers computer. It’s such a nifty and powerful tool, there’s so much you can do with it.

Imagemagick is a suite of command line tools that can edit, create and convert various image formats. Here’s a few commands I use regularly.