In a previous post, I explained the fundamentals of database design. This guide will cover the second half of that topic: how to make the database work with Rails. Before reading this you should have a good understanding of what a database is and how to organize one.

Rails is a framework that sits on top of the programming language Ruby. The framework speeds up web development by filling in code that you'd otherwise write from scratch on every new project. A component of this is ActiveRecord, a subset of Rails that acts as the bridge between your database and your Ruby code.

Not too long ago we came up with an idea to shake things up with our hackfests: The One Night Stand. We held the infamous event last Wednesday by matching people that needed help on a project with people willing to share their skills for a couple of hours. It was a great time all around and there was even some actual code written!

Not bad, especially when you consider that nobody had to suffer the humiliation of a walk of shame.

Our friends at TechStars inspired us with Founder Dating, a mixer created to match people who may someday get married in the form of co-founding a startup. Good stuff, but what if you're a developer or UI designer who's not ready to make that kind of commitment? Enter Quick Left's next Hackfest, The One Night Stand. No serious relationships, just one night of project oriented hacking.

How it works:

If you've got a project that needs some Ruby on Rails, Javascript, or user interface design expertise, tell us a little bit about it and describe the help you want.

If you're a developer or UI designer who's willing to help somebody else move their side project forward, tell us a little bit about your expertise.

Don't worry, if you're cheating on your co-founder or employer for the night, mum's the word.

When you arrive at QLHQ, I'll play matchmaker to help break the ice. We'll try to get as many people matched as we can to help move people's projects forward. Don't forget to bring your laptop. We'll provide the beer and pizza.

When: Wednesday 3/28 6:00pm - 9pm
Where: QLHQ
Register: Use our fancy form to register here

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...

If you've ever wanted to know what a database is, how a good one works, and how it hooks up with Rails, you are a nerd. And you've come to the right place. I gave a beginner talk about the subject at our recent hackfest and thought a blog post might be helpful for any beginners out there struggling with these concepts. Let's dive in.

If you've ever used a spreadsheet, you've used a database. Consider this table that tracks a bookstore's inventory:

We recently worked on a mapping application that lets users monitor their driving habits using real time data from their cars. The data came in the form of latitude/longitude points, from which we would build a trip and calculate statistics for that trip (speeding, distance, etc).

Because the car sends lat/long data every second, a Trip object can contain thousands of points. Each of these points in turn stores the standard rails timestamps, the latitude and longitude themselves, and some relational keys.

Since starting my apprenticeship with Quick Left just over three months ago, I've been asked frequently how I got started with Ruby on Rails. Being the efficiently lazy guy that I am, I thought I'd publicly share some of the resources I've been recommending during those conversations.

Creating an authentication system from scratch is simple with Rails 3.1, thanks to these two RailsCasts. What's left unexplained, however, is how to take advantage of this in your controller and model tests.

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.)

Late last week we released a new version of Prologue, our project-starter gem. The templating system is now more flexible, allowing for multiple named templates. Currently, the default prologue application template is the same as it always has been, but even that should be changing soon (hint hint).