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I recently found myself facing a metaprogramming challenge. I solved it by combining two terrible ugly hacks, and as such I won’t say I found a solution that is anywhere near to be elegant.

My problem was this: I was developing a Radiant extension called tags_multi_site, which allows the tags extension to play nice with the multi_site extension. This required me to scope all tags within a site, so that tags with the same name could exist in different sites, but in the same physical database table.

The tags extension has this validation:

class MetaTag < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_uniqueness_of :name, :case_sensitive => false
end

I needed to add :scope => :site_id, but I couldn’t touch the code of tags extension itself, since that would terribly un-DRY and not reusable for anyone else. I had to either modify the existing validation programmatically from my own extension or to remove it and add my own.

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I’ve been an independent web developer for over a month now, and I am enjoying every moment of it! If the first step in the liberation of programmers is getting Java- or .NET-free, the second step must be to get employer-free. Of course, being an employee has many benefits and doesn’t hold much risk (especially not if you live in one of these countries where it is practically impossible to fire people, such as Sweden or France), and being independent doesn’t mean – at least not yet for me – that you don’t have to do boring or tedious work.

But it does mean that any time during work hours where I am not doing work for a customer is my own time, and on my own time I get to decide what to work on. I am building a product during these free hours, and while I’d like to hold the details a bit longer (“don’t tell – show!” someone smart has said), I can say that it is a Ruby on Rails application allowing manipulation of PDF documents. Ruby has some decent PDF libraries, and Prawn holds a great potential, but none of these allow me to manipulate existing PDF documents.

The Java library iText is capable of doing so, and so is the .NET port iTextSharp, but would I really have to build some kind of web service in one of these forsaken frameworks? I was complaining about it to a friend, and promptly asked me: Why don’t you build it in JRuby? The more I thought about it, the more this seemed to be the perfect excuse for trying out JRuby, and so I set out to build my first ever JRuby on Rails application. It also helped that I got a free OpenSolaris/Glassfish VPS from Sun and Layered Technologies.

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“is bemused/awed by how fast svn became a legacy technology in ruby community/developers” Dr. Nic recently said on Twitter. It is true. Greatly aided by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s screencast on git, I myself is starting to feel comfortable enough with git to start abandoning subversion altogether.

Github is great, but there is really no reason to pay for private git repositories unless you need the added functionality. I have a Dreamhost account that I am happy with, so why not use that for my private git repos? It is easy to do through SSH, now that git is installed on all Dreamhost servers, but it is not that easy, so I thought I’d better document it here for my own future reference.

(This stuff is tested on Mac OSX, and should work fine for *nix users. Windows users will have to do some workarounds, but can use this as a reference point.)

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