Rails does an awful lot to optimize page generation, but there are a number of hacks, tweaks, and usage patterns you should be using to get the most out of your app. Configuration tweaks There’s a lot of the Rails stack that’s written in Ruby, which is great – it’s portable, it’s flexible, it works [...]

Ran into a small issue in one of my user models. I was using a helper to display a user’s first name, last initial. It looked something like this: Seems innocent enough, sure. Except…it doesn’t work in multibyte character sets. The first Cyrillic speaker to sign up blew that all up. When parsing an XML [...]