Recently, I helped a client that was having issues with deployments causing locking in their production databases.  At a high level, the two key components used in the environment were:

• Capistrano (scripted deployments) [website]
• Liquibase (database version control) [website]

At a high level, they currently used a CLI call to Liquibase as a sub-task within a larger deployment task.  The goal of this engagement was to modify that sub-task to run Liquibase in a non-blocking fashion as opposed to the default that just runs native ALTERS against the database.

As I wasn’t very familiar with Liquibase, I took this opportunity to learn more about it and it seems like a very valuable tool.  Essentially, it does the following:

• Adds two version control tables to …

I was invited to give a short introduction to Ruby on Rails at Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a couple of days ago. I’d been racking my brain for days on what to talk about — 15 minutes is too short for me to give a meaningful introduction to Rails — and eventually settled on telling a few stories.

The slides don’t make much sense on their own, so I’ve included the “script” of what I talked about too. I deviated quite a bit from the script as I got into it, so hopefully I should be able to provide audio (or, dread the thought, maybe even video) of the talk in due course.

Intro

I’m Graeme. I’m the Managing Director of Rubaidh Ltd, and have been developing Ruby on Rails applications professionally for 3 years now.

Telling Stories

To be honest, I didn’t know what my audience this evening was going to be like. I wasn’t sure if …