Scott Davis

Childhood Aspirations

Have you ever wanted to do something other than what you do now, that is, now that you’re grown up? I did, a few times actually. When I was much younger, helping animals sounded like a great and noble cause. I mean, I loved our dog, and I loved animals, so it was a match it seems. I even earned the Veterinary Medicine merit badge, so you knew I meant business. But it was during

Background (tldr, how I did it next section)

I first built my personal site over 10 years ago. I didn’t know much about web development then (even if I thought I did), so at first I stuck to what I knew most, flash. Those were the days, an entirely animated site. It may have been hell to maintain, and even to use sometimes, but they sure were fun to build.

After flash went out of style, very quickly, I just wanted a simple site but one where I could add content without having to add

I’ve been working on a project recently called www.explorableplaces.com, and I added memcached caching with Dalli. So I’m basically trying to cache anything and everything that can help our performance.

Normally, you will see guides and articles show you caching with an example like this:

def cached_images
  Rails.cache.fetch(['Articles', id, 'images', updated_at.to_i]) do
    images.to_a
  end
end

And while this now works, if I eager load an association, it will not

When we started building EastMeetEast last August, Bootstrap 3 was still a release candidate. It didn’t seem to make very much sense to implement it on our production site when it may have bugs or be updated and changed frequently.

After just a few weeks of work, the official release of 3.0 came out. At that point, we were more concerned with getting the product up and out than now backtracking to

Heroku only uses Postres for databases. That’s fine, so you just need install it locally for developement. Well, you are probably pulling your hair out trying to install the pg gem on Mavericks. That’s because you can’t (as of yet anyway). The good news is there’s a quick and easy way.

Just install the Postgres App, then install the gem in terminal, pointing it to the new config file.

gem install pg -- --with-pg-config=/Applications/Postgres93.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/pg_config

Now, make