Like most well-qualified Ruby developers, recruiters and hiring managers contact me frequently about their open web developer positions. The secret is out that you’ll get more bang for your buck with Ruby on Rails than the Java and .NET web frameworks, so small and large companies alike are clamoring for experienced Ruby developers. I read a year or more ago that there’s a shortage of at least 1,500 Ruby developers in the United States alone. That number has probably doubled or tripled by now. Everyone faces the same frustration: top Ruby talent is hard to come by.
Benchmarking Ruby String Conversion
I have a class (Parslet::Slice, to be precise) that inherits from String but needs to be converted back to a string. Which is faster, String#to_s or String()? My hunch is the latter, but I can find out for sure in about a minute:
Deploying Octopress to Heroku With a Custom Buildpack
I’ve had apps on Heroku since 2009, but over the last year or so I’ve been deploying apps there more and more. With the advent of the Cedar stack, there’s less and less you can’t do. Compared to provisioning a virtual server, even with the help of moonshine, you can’t beat heroku create --stack cedar: boom, you have a live site with backups, logging, release management and the running of migrations and asset compilation on deploy. In just another few minutes, you can have SSL, rotating database backups, NewRelic, HopToad, cron, DNS, monitoring, and myriad other addons.
When I switched my blog from Radiant CMS to Octopress, I wanted to keep the site on Heroku. It’s free under normal scenarios and if I ever get on HackerNews or Reddit, I just have to scale up my web processes and pay a bit to keep the site responsive. If I were to be so fortunate, I wouldn’t have to scramble to set up load balancing on Linode or even wait while my slice resized. Yay cloud!
The standard method for deploying Octopress to Heroku involves generating your site, checking in the generated contents (within the public/ folder), and deploying to Heroku. As Matthew Manning noted, neither having to check in generated content nor having it generated on-the-fly is ideal. We really need to hook into Heroku’s build phase.
The Cedar stack lets you provide a buildpack for generating the app. It’s how the stack can support Node.js, Python, PHP, etc. I forked Manning’s buildpack and customized it for Octopress. Here’s what you need to do to deploy your Octopress site to Heroku: