http://thunderdata.com/blog TDS - General Business, Programming and Code, Ideas for the Web Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:52:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We've adopted a standard convention for deploying Rails apps that places the files in a subdomain of our clients' domains. Since we use Plesk, there are some steps we have to take to get Capistrano deploys working. Since we deploy a lot of apps, I decided to write ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/10-steps-to-capistrano-and-plesk-subdomains-deployment/ I hit a wall recently as I tried to track down the reason validates_presence_of was not displaying errors. Rails validations normally go off without a hitch, so I was a bit stumped when my attempts to save blank fields were not triggering the appropriate messages. After ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/rails-gotchas-validates_presence_on-error_message_for-display-failure/ In a traditional store, paying by credit card involves swiping the card through a swipe machine, which reads the data stored on a credit card's magnetic stripe.  The data includes a few key bits of information, namely: The account number and expiration date of the card ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/magnets-in-a-digital-world-credit-card-swipe-processing/ I'm always pleasantly surprised when I stumble upon the result of a company's marketing efforts and realize how perfectly they succeeded in directing their message. My favorite, a television ad campaign for Prego, used music to drive home the old-world style of their spaghetti sauce and succeeded beautifully. In ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/marketing-in-down-times/ During a conversation with a large national client, two of their staff members made the implication that their "boss", the executive director, was out of touch with what was going on in the trenches, and he should not be consulted on important decisions.   Though I agree that the director may ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/can-management-understand-employee-needs/ Today, we received a client request to improve a page's load time while in the midst of making major aesthetic improvements to another site.  When I suggested we switch gears to help the client, I was met with resistance in the form of frustration that the new project was being ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/changing-course-team-priorities-and-client-relationships/ The Thunder Data dev team was represented at this year's RailsConf in Las Vegas, and we learned quite a bit.  We're starting a series of RailsConf Retrospectives to delve into some of the topics covered at the conference. Testing One of the most pervasive themes at RailsConf was that of testing and ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/railsconf-retrospectives-part-1-testing/ Every Monday morning our team engages in a sprint planning meeting.  Starting with a retrospective of the prior week, we discuss problems, successes, and ideas from individually posted notes on each topic  Intended to be frank discussions, we are openly enthusiastic about the good things that occur, but our challenges ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/fixing-a-dysfunctional-team/ As a developer, it's easy to get buried in code and forget how people actually use what I'm writing.  An interface element or workflow that seems intuitive to me can often lead to confusion and frustration in the casual visitor.  If I want to transform my code into an application, ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/show-something-useful/ On one of our projects we were porting over a legacy application written in PHP to Rails. A lot of the application's users accessed the site with bookmarked pages. So we wanted to redirect users when we saw specific words like "buy" or ".php", so customers were not ... http://thunderdata.com/blog/category/catch-all-routes-in-rails/