Lessons Learned (and Mistakes Repeated) - Adventures in Ruby on Rails

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you run into some totally goofy problem with your Rails application, a problem that you're completely confident you've seen (and conquered) previously after a few hours of using the google on the internets, finding a solution, then spending several more hours tweaking your app, the deployment or one of the other five-dozen moving parts in the typical RoR app.

But the elation lasts about 5 seconds because you realize:

• You didn't write down how you fixed it last time, or
• You didn't bookmark the site where you found the answer, or
• You did bookmark the site, but have no idea what the hell the bookmark is called, or
• You did bookmark it, you do find the bookmark, but the site's gone belly-up

Yeah, I thought so. Well, this is my attempt to save myself, and anyone else who stumbles across this blog, from suffering so many self-inflicted forehead slaps.

Being a relative newcomer to Ruby on Rails, and despite my expensive attempts to get smart (measured in money spent on books, Peepcode screencasts and PDFs and, actually, really good training) I somehow still manage to make the same dumb mistakes regularly.

The band-aid I'm going to place over that gaping wound of jackassery is the listing here of those foul-ups and how I fixed them. Perhaps the next time I get that deja vu feeling all over again I can spare my cranium an open-handed "Dooh!".