Terrific quote by Joshua Ballanco on an otherwise silly hacker news thread:

…people don’t remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you’ve fixed them.

One of my biggest personal failures is my inability to convince those around me to stop sticking with jobs/careers/industries/etc they hate.

If it doesn’t feel right, don’t settle on the first or second career field you dabble in. Keep searching. Eventually you will find work you love to do. If you catch yourself working hard and loving every minute of it, don’t stop. You’re on to something big. Because hard work isn’t hard when you concentrate on your passions.

It doesn’t matter what you have already invested. You will never get that back. Look forward and find something you love to do (and yes, it is possible for everyone).

Mike Perham details why you should never rescue Exception directly.

A must read for every ruby developer.

Also, as mentioned in the comments, Avdi Grimm’s Exceptional Ruby is also highly recommended.

Osfoora is a new’ish Twitter client for the Mac.

Overall, it is a very polished app that works extremely well. It has all the features you would expect in a great Mac Twitter client:

1. Multiple account support
2. Lots of keyboard short cuts
3. Growl notifications (if you are into that)
4. Instapaper integration (it’s about the links)
5. Good inline image previews

However, there are some things which drive me nuts and I hope get fixed/updated/implemented:

1. No easy way to scroll to the top. I really don’t need to read or scroll through all tweets. The lack of support for Command+ArrowUp catches me off guard all the time.
2. No keyboard short cut for reporting spam and/or blocking someone. Direct missile support would be nice as well.
3. You can mute users (nice) but muting keywords would be better. I am really hoping to avoid seeing even a single SXSW tweet. Help!
4. No drag drop on images. Similar to scrolling I try this daily because it is just supposed to work in every Mac app.
5. If you are going to support Url shorteners, skipping bit.ly is a big oversight.

Despite the list above, I still highly recommend it. $5 is a small price to pay for something as nicely put together as Osfoora.

And of course, don’t forget you can find me way too often on Twitter at @scottw.

NEVER, EVER, EVER, NEVER SEND A CUSTOMER AN EMAIL SHE CANNOT REPLY TO.

Why miss the opportunity to engage with your (would be) customer? Why make them jump through even a single hoop to contact you?

I wrote about this a while ago on the KickoffLabs blog as well: Email Is Never Just a Notification.

Unwind has a single goal. Take a url and figure out what it actually points to.

It is able to walk various redirect status codes, handles relative and absolute locations, and a couple of other gotchas.

Once completed you have the destination url and a list of the hops along the way.

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require 'unwind'

follower = Unwind::RedirectFollower.resolve('http://j.mp/Ai8S1s')
assert_equal 'http://www.scottw.com/unwind', follower.final_url

Hat Tip: This gem started with code from John Nunemaker’s Following Redirects with Net/HTTP which provided the basic code to get this done.

Why is this important? It means no more committing the public directory into git.

Even with just 200 or so posts, my git history felt like it was exploding every time I wrote a new post.

I went ahead and nuked my old blog repo and recommitted this cleaner (and leaner) version if you need a starting place.

Jason’s steps were great, but I did run into two snags:

1. I could not set the buildpack directly when creating the app. I had to add the heroku config var for it instead.
2. I got an error about a missing daemon gem. Heroku’s cedar stack is still in beta and running a RC version of bundler (as of today). I haven’t dug any further, but nuking my gem vendor folder and starting over seemed to do the trick.

I have been meaning to implement this on my own for a while.

I did make one minor adjustment David’s example. Instead of inlining the glyph, I am adding it via CSS:

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a.external-link:after {
  content: " \27A6";
}

For KickoffLabs, we rolled our own authentication. This worked really well, but doing it (even if we packaged it up) for future projects is less than appealing.

I have used/tried Devise, Clearance, and AuthLogic but none of them seemed to fit.

Enter Sorcery. Sorcery is a relatively new player in the rails authentication arms race.

If you google for Heroku SSL you will find a surprisingly long list of blog posts usually with many steps.

However, it is actually much easier than what most of them list, especially if you are using DNSimple (note: affiliate link).

Here is how to setup a Hostname Based certificate on Heroku: