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A List Apart: There's still a lot to be learned about the basics.

Sass: At least as incredibly amazing as Haml if not more incredibly amazing.

Simplification is extremely gratifying. I spent a full day refactoring my views, reducing a bunch of wasteful css, and creating dynamic stylesheets that just work.

Rake is also amazing and you probably knew that, yet you still didn't tell me that!

"Deployment" is so much more complicated than "Deployment." Know what I'm saying?

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About to travel down to Maryland for a day or two of sunshine and relaxation, and also to play a show in Baltimore on sunday night. I've been working for two weeks full time at Clinic and I'm having a great time. Our office is very laid back, and everyone manages to get their work done and also to enjoy each other's company. We also share the office with another firm, and it's been crucial to see them working in an Agile way on big projects. I'm trying get as much feedback as I can about it before we start it for a small project, which is starting next week. My larger project is actually nearing completion, with some majorly tricky data modeling and interface features present that took a hell of a lot of beating on my head to figure out.

The staging server is just about set up with nginx, rails, ruby, mongrel clusters (thin too, testing both), god for monitoring, capistrano for deployment, git for version control, and a whole lot more. Again, can't recommend the Slicehost Articles enough.

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I now work full time as a Ruby and Rails developer. Our company is called Clinic-IT and we're specializing in Rails apps for internal use in various small businesses. I have several months worth of work lined up and will be putting the word out more soon. Very, very stoked.

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GitHub is one of the most productivity enhancing tools I've ever had the pleasure of using. After playing around with a bunch of other people's projects, and adding a small plugin which is in its nascent stages, I have recently moved my large long-term project to GitHub via a private account. The "micro" account is $7/month, very affordable, and is more than enough for what I need for now. Additionally, GitHub nails almost every single good design feature I look for in a website. Bravo.

Yes, I've been slacking. Mostly writing elsewhere, but having some awesome breakthroughs. Anonymous scopes are the bomb. Advanced search is now pretty simple, and the link between reporting and saving searches is almost gone! Ruport is serving me well also, check it out.