For those who don't know Git is a version control system developed by Linus Torvalds. It's main difference from other tools like SVN and CVS is the fact that it's distributed. Recently I gave a workshop about Git here at the company where I walked through the most common cases I usually see when working in a team and thought about posting a summary of the commands used in the workshop.

As many of you know the new language supported at GAE now is Java, as officially announced on their blog. As a Ruby/Rails developer you might not be interested on it but here is a reason you should be: JRuby. It was only a matter of time until we saw some people deploying JRuby on Rails apps on GAE, like Ola Bini's mini blog app. Guess that was the first one really, as he was beta testing the service in secret.

It's been more than a year since I started my new endeavor here in Spain, moving from Brazil and starting a whole new life - both personal and professional. Time for a little retrospective. More precisely, a retrospective about the agile practices here at the company. When I first started out back in January '08 the company thought they were agile. NOT! They did adopt some XP practices but just to give you an idea, I'm gonna focus on just one: stand-up meetings.

Update: Go ahead and read this post in its entirety - including the comments. Then, read my other post where I expand the subject a little more. -- Every now and then I still do some Java coding. And I actually like it. I spent several years of my career developing primarily in Java and am very keen about the language. I've been a fierce defender of it these days, specially with the wave of popularity of other languages such as Ruby and Groovy.

Tomorrow I'll be once more heading London for this year's QCon. As usual, the schedule looks amazing and I'll try to keep you all posted about what's going on there. Oh and if any of you guys is going and wanna meet up for a geek talk and a couple of beers, just send me a message. Cheers! :)

This is a very useful tip I shared a while ago at the office and turned out to be extremely useful.

If you work with java and use eclipse as an IDE you know that eclipse has something called WTP, which stands for Web Tools Platform. It's a set of tools and API's to aid in the development of web and JEE projects.

That means that if you have a WTP project in your workspace, you can deploy, run and debug it straight from the IDE. But what happens if your project is not of a WTP nature?

Back at the office we have a coupe of really old Java project. WTP didn't exist back then but we do use Eclipse as our IDE of choice.

So, how do we debug a deployed project that we don't actually deploy from the IDE? As long as you have the source, it is quite simple:

So here I am! Alive and kicking!!! Just got back from vacation. Brazil was awesome and so was xmas in Norway! Lots of food in both places! Need a diet! :p Warming up for new year's now. But the reason for this post is the last comment on my Rails 2.0 scaffold post, quoted here: Hi Leonardo, I am extremely grateful for your info altruism. I thought maybe I could show my gratitude with a small donation but I don’t see anywhere on your site to do so.

UPDATE: By next friday I meant this friday, december 5th. Tks Pillip! :P This will be a really quiet month on my blog. The reason? Next friday I'm going to Brazil for vacation and right after, in the end of december, I'm going to extend my trip a bit and spend xmas in Norway. Just hope to come back alive from Brazil! My friends are promising a real blast!!!!! :D

There are several ways you can measure your rails application's performance. The techniques range from filling your code with "puts" statements - :p - to fancy ones like NewRelic - which is quite nice, I must say. But what many people don't know is that rails ships with a handful of scripts to help you out. One of which is called profiler, located under your application's scripts/performance directory. By default it uses the standard ruby profiler but if you want more speed - and additional reporting options - , consider installing the ruby-prof gem.

As you may already know, Merb turned 1.0 a while ago and I decided to resume my studies to learn the framework. So I just built a new app with a few resources and fired the migration scripts: $ rake db:automigrate And this is what I got: Loading init file from /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/init.rb Loading /Users/leo/projects/merb/my-first-app/config/environments/development.rb ~ Connecting to database... /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/dm-core-0.9.6/lib/dm-core/adapters/data_objects_adapter.rb:137:in `initialize': wrong number of arguments (8 for 1) (ArgumentError)