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Sooner or later every web application is going to need to render HTML to its users, but keeping this view code modular, reusable, and consistent can be quite a challenge. DRY, Don't Repeat Yourself, is one of the guiding design principles of Ruby on Rails, and no where is it more evident than in Action View's templating system. Now there is a plugin to make keeping track of which partial is rendering what HTML: Partial Insight.

As part of our recent interface update we added the ability to tag resources in Onehub. From a programmer's perspective tagging is a relatively simple feature to implement and support. However from a user's perspective tags can be difficult and cumbersome to use. In order to avoid the mistakes of the past, Matt and I methodically researched how other teams have approached this problem; disappointingly, we found that most applications use a simple input box and expect users manually ensure the input is correct. However, we were quite impressed with the solution provided by Facebook. Although the Facebook's use case is slightly different, we knew we wanted our tagging interface to function similarly. Fortunately for us InteRiders and Venado had created an excellent Prototype script that proved to be a great starting point.

Onehub is built on the Amazon Web Services Platform, and as a result we are able to quickly and easily provision new servers to meet demand. We have servers for load distribution, web serving, queue processing, transcoding, administration, and other tasks. Consequently, every new server we launch needs a specific configuration in order to fulfill its functional role in our infrastructure. After careful consideration, we settled on Puppet to manage the configuration of our servers. Puppet does the majority of the heavy lifting -- installing packages, writing out configuration files, etc -- but, we still needed something to group and instruct these Puppet instances. Combining a number of open source tools, we were able to vastly simplify the management of our cloud, and bring the familiar cap deploy to our infrastructure.

A maintenance page is a common feature in a rails deployment. This feature enables the developers to put their application into "maintenance mode", returning 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and a helpful page that describes what is happening and when the user can expect service to resume.