Interesting Things

• Beware setting class variables in Rails Initializers: Schubert warned us that if you’re setting vars on your Rails classes inside of config/initializers, you’ll see weird things happen in development mode.

  If you set a class var on a model in an initializer, the value will be available on your first request to the app. However, upon the second request, Rails will reload the class, but it will not reload the initializers. At this point, you’ll have lost the value.

• Bash Brace Expansion: If you ever find yourself renaming a file in some faraway path, you think to yourself, “Wouldn’t be nice if I didn’t have to specify the entire path and filename twice?” Many shells provide you with a nice shortcut.

  So, instead of:

  mv /a/b/c/d/foo.feature /a/b/c/d/bar.feature
  

  You can use:

  mv /a/b/c/d/{foo,bar}.feature
  

  It’s pretty hot. Of course, there are many other applications of brace expansion. Check out the reference here:
  http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Brace-Expansion

Dangerous

Schubert rewired a bunch of power cables in the server room. If you notice that something isn’t right, you now know who to blame.

Events

• Peter mentions that BarCamp NYC is this weekend, May 21, 22. It sounds like a lot of fun, and a great place to learn and meet interesting people.

• Agile UX will be meeting here this Thursday. The topic will be Rails for UXers.

Stretches

Finally, Austin lead us in stretches this morning. It was quite exhilarating. Most of us ripped our pants and snapped our credit cards in half.