The Bullet gem helps you optimize your Rails app by pointing out where you have N+1 queries in your code (check out this RailsCast if you have no idea what that means). I recently needed to set it up for an older Rails app, still running Rails 2. Here’

If your Rails app requires Java and you’re using Cloud66, you’ll want to setup a script to automatically install it on your web servers during the build process. You can do this with deployment hooks. These let you specify shell scripts to run during the build process of

Cloud66 will automatically install and setup Redis for you after analyzing your app. By default Cloud66 will provide a REDIS_ADDRESS environment variable with the IP address to your redis server. To get it running with Sidekiq, add the variable to your Procfile. worker: env RAILS_ENV=$RAILS_ENV REDIS_

Here’s an easy way to share data across multiple controllers in Angular JS. First, setup a service that contains shared variables that you want to be accessible across controllers. I create getters/setters for each piece of data. This is a simple example. # shared attributes service. app.factory "Shared"

Big spender. There’s my heroku bill after hosting the voting for a local television contest. $2.37. Over 40,000 people used the app over a period of 2 weeks. I spent the same amount on coffee this morning. What?! How?! I’ve always been really interested in scaling

Updating objects with Grape can be a little tricky and can lead to pretty bloated PUT methods. The simplest way to keep your code clean is to use update_attributes. Then you can pass in your params and update your object with just 1 line of code. project.update_attributes(

Grape makes it really easy to secure your API with http basic authentication. Here’s a quick example on how to authenticate via HTTP basic with devise. class Api < Grape::API # /private resource :private do http_basic do |email, password| user = User.find_by_email(email) user && user.valid_password?

Ever forget to sudo a command? Instead of typing it out again, save yourself some time and try this: $ sudo !!

When pushing new code to heroku, it shuts down and reboots your dynos. The problem with this is that it can take a few seconds for them to come back online. This makes your application really slow for anyone currently using it. The way to fix this is to use

TLDR; Adding SSL to your Heroku app is easier and less expensive if you use CloudFlare. Heroku & SSL All Heroku apps already support SSL by piggybacking on Heroku’s SSL certificate (https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com). Unfortunately, if you need SSL on a custom domain, you’ll have to buy Heroku’

Mathy-Poll is a voting API that asks basic math questions before recording the vote. It was originally written in Sinatra when I was still fairly new to Ruby. Today I had some free time and decided to move it over to Grape/Goliath. Grape is a micro-framework that’s specifically

If you want to allow access to your Grape API from other domains, you need to implement CORS! It’s easy with the rack-cors gem. Here’s how you do it. Add rack-cors to your gemfile. gem 'rack-cors', :require => 'rack/cors' Then go to your application.rb and add: [gist

Check this out. I’ve been using it for a couple months. Need to share a file really quick? Just run: geturl filename It uploads the file and places the URL in your clipboard. Get it on GitHub.

Grape is a Ruby framework for developing API’s. It’s fairly easy to mount it onto an existing Rails application. One of the challenges I had with it was organizing the file/class structure. The Grape documentation is a little weak in this area. If your API has more

The best time to send your customer email is when they are awake… and at their computers. When your customers are distributed throughout the world it gets a little tricky. We read somewhere that open rates at 9am and 4pm are significantly higher than any other time of the day.