Code Benders

Miles Forrest interviews Avdi Grimm on his new book “Exceptional Ruby”. Dealing with unexpected failures in code is tough, and oftentimes error processing is dealt with in a haphazard way. Hear the 5 questions you need to ask before writing code to handle unexpected failures, as well as his story about a cascading failure that went from bad to worse.

You can listen to the interview and purchase “Exceptional Ruby” on the Pragmatic Bookshelf website.

Ruby on Rails makes it easy to bootstrap a greenfield project. Unfortunately not all projects are greenfield, so sometimes you need to work with a legacy database schema. ActiveRecord is a great choice when you have a full control over your database from the very beginning, but what should you do if you need to connect to a database with a schema that isn’t in-line with Rails conventions?

DataMapper Core Contributor and Code Benders team member, Piotr Solnica, has written a great blog post for our partner Engine Yard entitled Using DataMapper and Rails with Legacy Schemas. Read it and you can say goodbye to your fear of inheriting a legacy app.

A well-deserved congratulations to the team at CiviData on the Beta launch of their new local government data aggregation and comparison tool. After several months of iteration, the product is being launched to invitees only. If you are an employee of a local or state government and want a better understanding of how your services compare to other localities, you can sign up to join the free Beta test by visiting the CiviData website.

You can learn more about the project here.