Posts tagged ‘ruby on rails’

Rails: so successful it’s starting to hurt? 2 Jun 08


One thing that we often hear from customers is how difficult it is find Rails developers. Which is funny since we also hear people saying how they’d love a job building Rails applications.

The well-being of the Rails community is important to us, so we’d like to try and do what we can to keep it bubbling along nicely :)

One of the ideas that came up was some sort of Rails training network that would help bridge any skills gap. But before we do anything, we want to understand whether there is actually a skills gap, or just an “expectation gap” in either price or experience (anybody with any sort of Rails commercial experience is almost certainly gainfully employed at a good rate at the moment).

So, we’d like to hear from you if…

1) You’re in the market for Rails talent and would either be interested in using a Rails training programme, or interested in talking to ‘graduates’ of such a programme or

2) You’re a developer and you’d be interested in signing up for a Rails training programme and potentially getting your name in front of Rails employers.

Drop us an email to hello [at] the brightbox uk domain - we’ll gauge interest and take it from there.

Posted 2 June 2008 by Neil Wilson ::: add comment

Brightbox Gem v0.24 2 Nov 07

I’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox Gem. It might takes a few hours to get to all the Rubyforge mirrors but in the mean time you can download and install it manually directly from the project page.

It’s largely just a maintenance release, which means no Capistrano v2.0 support just yet, it still requires Capistrano 1.4.1. Cap 2.0 support is in the works though and will be released soon.

A quick summary of the changes:

  • Fixes default Monit config bug (changes totalmem to mem, no more false memory overage alarms!)
  • Fails out if MySQL database exists on cold_deploy (you really shouldn’t be running a cold_deploy a second time anyway)
  • Adds reconfigure task (for easy adding of mongrels or domain changes)
  • Archives Apache configs on cold_deploy or reconfigure
  • Fixes Capistrano 1.4 dependency (will pull in v1.4.1 if necessary now)
  • Changes default Apache log location to /var/log/web (for new cold_deploys or reconfigures)

Remember that you need to upgrade the Brightbox gem both in your development environment and on your Brightbox.

The HOWTO on deploying your Rails app using the Brightbox is here as usual.

Posted 2 November 2007 by John Leach ::: add comment

Why we chose Ubuntu Dapper Drake 3 Aug 07

We’ve had a few beta testers ask about why we chose Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) as our primary Xen guest installation, as opposed to one of the more recent releases such as Edgy or Feisty. We chose it primarily because of its support contract.

Ubuntu’s release schedule sees a new version released roughly every 6 months. These releases contain the very latest versions of the software packaged with it and are supported for only 18 months. Once in a while a version is selected as Long Term Support release (LTS) which gets 5 years of server support (3 years for desktop). By support, I mean the Ubuntu team are committed to releasing security upgrades in a timely manner. Dapper was the first LTS version and is support through to June 2011.

If we’d chosen Edgy, security upgrades wouldn’t be available to us after April 2008, forcing all of our Brightboxers to upgrade to Feisty, and so on every 18 months. With the speed that the Rails community jump deployment strategy ships some might say this isn’t a problem, but most installations do need long term stability and Dapper provides that.

There are some issues though, mainly that Dapper’s version of Apache is too old to support the nice proxy balancing stuff that’s used for Mongrel deployments1. To solve this, we chose to use a backported Apache package2. This does mean that we have to commit to backporting all security fixes, but this is trivial compared to all our guest machines needing a full upgrade every 18 months. We still get the Ubuntu team working for us on the other 99.9% of packages.

For our users who like to ride the bleeding edge, they can still upgrade to Feisty themselves if they know what they are doing but for most, this isn’t what Brightbox is all about.

1 A beta tester pointed us in the direction of this bug report requesting an official Apache backport for Dapper. The more people testing these packages and voicing their support, the more likely this might happen.

2 We’re using the backported Apache package provided by kodefoo.com at the moment (http://www.kodefoo.com/2007/2/18/deploying-rails-on-ubuntu-dapper/) but are ready to roll our own if necessary.

Posted 3 August 2007 by John Leach ::: add comment

Brightbox beta program 19 Jun 07

We’re currently looking for a few more active Rails developers to help us test our new Brightbox rails hosting service and provide some valuable feedback. The ideal participants will most likely fit most of the following profile:

  1. Be developing in Ruby on Rails almost exclusively for new projects.
  2. Currently hosting, or looking to host in the next 3 months, at least one production rails app
  3. At least some experience of deploying rails to a production environment
  4. Be the decision-maker, have the casting vote or at least have a major say in where apps are hosted at their company or agency
  5. Have an active or rails-focused blog

Interested? drop a quick email to beta-req@brightbox.co.uk and tell us a bit about your app/apps and how you fit into the above profile. You might just get a free brightbox to play with, plus a nice discount when we launch.

UPDATE: (30 Jul 2007)
We’re well into the beta programme now so we’re not looking for any more beta testers.

Posted 19 June 2007 by Jeremy Jarvis ::: 2 comments