purephase

That's awesome. I just spent some time going through the getting started section for each project so in my haste I missed all the best parts. Back to it!

Seems silly in hindsight to not consider that. ;)

Excellent! Thanks for letting me know. I'll have to dive back in and check it out.

Steve, thanks for following-up.

For point one, I mean that developers have free range with helper definitions and that they eventually find their way into controllers.

Interesting news about performance tests in <4. I didn't realize that, I'll check them out.

The eval problem is as follows (typically if you have to eval something in a gem):

    class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
      before_save :bar
      ..
    end

    Foo.class_eval do
      # I want to remove before_save callback here without having to redefine it.

      before_save :bar
      ...
      def bar
        return
      end
    end

It's not a big deal, just adds clutter. Thanks again!

I love the concept, but I couldn't figure out how to make the server inventory dynamic. I tag a lot of instances and want to use the AWS API to grab a list of tagged instances to automatically build the server inventory on execution.

Since the instances are so variable (auto-scaling etc.) I see that as a killer feature. Maybe I have to dig deeper, but I spent some time evaluating it against Chef/Puppet etc. and I couldn't find anything.

Thanks for putting this together Steve. Your work, and those of the Rails contributors is amazing stuff. I know this past year has been a pain from a security perspective but as a framework matures and adds n+ features, it is an inevitable outcome.

For me, my wish list would be:

- Down with helpers. Or, at least the ability to arbitrarily set them. Maybe push presenter as alternatives?

- Some native performance tuning/testing/reporting would be awesome. Gems like rack-mini-profiler and ruby-prof are great, but a near-native tool, opinionated at that, would be awesome.

- I personally love the decorator pattern that gems like Spree use. Unfortunately (and maybe this is my own failing), eval'ing filters/callbacks is a big pain.

- As mentioned in another comment, the env specific configuration provided by figaro is awesome and should be native in Rails. Specifically, it might be a welcome alternative to the secret_token issue.

- Most deployment tools (Capistrano/Mina) enforce a different folder structure. It might be helpful to include some of them by default, or provide configurable options/symlinks that will work out of the box.

I have a lot more items on my list but those are the top items that I can think of at the moment.

Another vote for this. The figaro gem is awesome and it should be default Rails.

Thanks!

I feel like I have this argument on every project I'm involved in. Designers seem to love these switches but end-user testing has always been lukewarm as users can't quite tell the actual state.

I think there is a reason there is no HTML element for this and that zurb/bootstrap (and their earlier ilk) don't include them either.

But, given that I lose this argument every time I appreciate projects that make them easier to implement. Thanks for sharing.

I really like the graphs at the top in the left most pane and the ability to swipe between dashboards. Are those public widgets/functionality? Or, did you add those?

I agree with you. It particularly resonates in this piece as he repeatedly tears into the intelligence services (specifically MI5) as being completely incompetent.

I find his work to be a constant reminder of how fallible the human species is, how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise (some are better at it than others) and the utter inanity that it almost always leads to.

If only it were humourous endings to these reports.

This has been out for a few weeks now. Why is on the front page? Topic could be a bit more specific.

Web development. Mac, but most of my time spent in Ubuntu VM (through Fusion -- planning on installing it on metal soon) with ST3 (a lot of packages), git, hipchat and keepass/1password.

I do a lot of DevOp related work so I spend a lot of time in iTerm2/terminal on EC2 instances and rue the day that I haven't worked through Chef/Puppet (yet).

I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but, and you have to realize this, MS already has that platform. They're so far ahead with said platform that all of this is just play money to them and they have ample time to invest heavily into R&D.

No other platform is even remotely ready for corporate environment. Not by a long shot. The billions invested in Windows software by every company on the planet means incredible vendor lock and the momentum required to move past that is so immense that is just not possible.

Any possibility of their "death" is ridiculous. This is just a slight bump in the road for them, they'll shift strategy and lather, rinse, repeat.

I so want to be a PIH. I just can't get enough free time to put my shit together as my day job sucks it all away.

Seriously, your goal is awesome and I love it. Aside from donations (which I've done) is there anything else that we can do to help?

It's more that the groundswell of support for the 2nd amendment, even going to far to stockpile in lieu of any possible changes, should apply equally to other amendments. Particularly ones that are as important as the fourth.

Sure, there were some protests on Independence Day and I applaud the efforts of those involved, but it seems like regular Americans are largely either unaware or just don't care about it at all.

These "order-loving people" are the same ones that buy-out all ammunition when a vague proposal is put forward to improve gun registration... I'm not sure how to reconcile these positions at all.

In all honesty, for all the freedom-related speech in the US and the so-called constitutionally protected rights against government corruption and abuse, I'm shocked that Americans are not in the streets rioting right now.

Well, that does it. I was waiting to see if BlackBerry would do something with their tablet line before the next Nexus 7 announcement and nada.

Looks like I'll have to pick one of these up.

(And, I know what the comments are going to be but the Playbook is an underrated device IMO. For the price, it has some decent specs (for it's age) and as a browser/ereader it's great, but the fact that they dropped OS10 after promising it has me peeved.)

Congrats GH. raganwald is a class act.

I didn't realize that he lived in Toronto though. Awesome to see the streetcar on the GH blog!

KW has been/is largely fuelled by RIM/BlackBerry and the University of Waterloo. If the situation gets any worse for BlackBerry, you'll see an enormous brain drain and capital leave the area.

Ottawa is the country's capital and some tech companies there are doing quite well (Shopify in particular).

Now if we could only tackle the certificate authorities...

Having spent time in South Africa and Botswana, in the summer, I can attest that it is hotter here in the summer after taking humidity into consideration.

Believe me, it's still hot and arid and the sun is relentless during the day (very long days, but beautiful nights -- the stars are incredible). There is very little shade and most of that part of the continent is flat and in near-desert like conditions.

I lived directly off the okavango delta which certainly cooled things a bit and added a touch more humidity to the air, but this summer on the eastern seaboard of NA is one of the worst I've experienced.

As a developer and project manager, I love these posts. As an owner or senior manager, I hate these posts.

That is the divide that needs crossing.

To be honest, that's one of the worst implementations I've seen of that effect. Personally, I'm a fan of it when it's well done. Here's one example:

https://www.airbnb.com/annual/

While this a great story, I'd focus more on what you shipped. I can see it being a valuable service for people.

"Create a free box now!" and "Sign-up for free now!" should be "Find out how we can dramatically improve your development workflow" or some such (better copy).

The currect text assumes that you know what the service is.

Admittedly, I missed the "home" button in the top right as I assumed the logo would take me to the home page, not to the blog. I stopped trying after that.

This is a common thread on HN with launch announcements. I'm not sure why everyone avoids the blog pre-amble for posts destined for link aggregators:

"Nitrous.IO, the groundbreaking developer toolset that enables fast provisioning and web-based coding and collaboration is pleased to announce the first public beta. To find out more, check out our quick introduction..."

Then move on to specifics. I'm not a copy-editor, but a leading sentence like this would go along way to help.

Since the blog doesn't have an immediately obvious link to the actual product homepage, here you go: https://www.nitrous.io/

My synopsis: A server provisioning, web-based IDE that allows for collaborative development.

To the OP and owners, please correct me if I'm wrong but, either put that in the title of the post or add it as an addendum to your blog posts. At the very least, put a clear link to your main site on your blog.

All that being said, the service does look pretty cool. Congrats on the public beta.

Edit: Changed as the blog does have links to the home page, they're just not immediately obvious. My apologies.

Which, honestly, it kind of a dumb move on Google's part. I was never a fan of that recovery address process. The 2-factor auth they've implemented since is much better.