There are many ways to cache data in a Rails application. (The official Rails Guide explains the different approaches well.) Heroku allows you to easily take advantage of Rails caching by connecting your application to Memcached servers through the Dalli client gem.

This drop in solution is simple, but there's one glaring problem. Memcache does not support expiring cache keys with regex. This means if you need to delete keys beginning with "user-1" but not keys beginning with "user-2", you're out of luck. Or so it seems...

A little known fact about Heroku's cedar platform is that it's capable of even more than advertised (and that's already a long list: Ruby, Node.js 0.4.7, Scala, Java, Clojure, Python/Django, etc). Here's how to customize a cedar "buildpack" to compile the latest version of Node.

As the Rocky Mountain Ruby-filled week draws to a close, we’d like to do a quick recap of the Hackfest. Participants had a little under 2 and a half hours to pull down the repo, write a Ruby gem and two iPads were on the line...

We recently inherited a legacy Rails 2 app in sore need of an upgrade. Here are some of our favorite takeaways. (We'll cover the back-end gains here; the front-end post will come shortly.)

Last night was our monthly Hackfest at the Quick Left offices. This month we did a little something different (and had quite a few extra guests), which turned out to be a smashing success.

Our most recent Hack Fest centered around writing chat bots and one of the outcomes was that Quick Left gained an in-house bot to occupy our common Campfire room. Here's what it does and how we did it.