Top all-time · #2413
John Nunemaker
Personal blog · railstips.orgprogramming
John Nunemaker writes RailsTips, a personal blog at railstips.org about programming. Since 2008, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 47 times, most often “Stop Googling”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
RailsTips is John Nunemaker’s archive of Ruby, Rails, and software development articles from 2006–2016.
Most-linked posts?
- Stop Googling3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-10-14
- I Have No Talent3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-12
- Misleading Title About Queueing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-05
- Data Modeling in Performant Systems2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-01-27
What Hacker News says?
I wish I had happened on this article 10 years ago ... I was always very good at school, so I picked up what I thought were bad habits. Reading this now, it's clear that what I was doing was protecting myself from failure. When I'd do badly on a test in a class that I thought I should do well in, I'd stop taking the class seriously so that when I got a 'C' I could kid myself and say "I did that and wasn't even reall…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/
on “Why Do Some People Learn Faster?”Submitted I Have No Talent as a story · 334 points
HN discussionI also find it very helpful to spiff up my prompt when changing into a git repo: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/02/02/bedazzle-your-...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2009/02/02/bedazzle-your-bash-prompt-with-git-info/
on “A better git log”Submitted Stop Googling as a story · 251 points
HN discussionThis is similar to John Nunemaker's fantastic talk/blog-post called I Have No Talent. Here's his post: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-tale... and slides: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/04/18/i-have-no-tale...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2010/04/18/i-have-no-talent-redux/
on “There is no talent”Submitted Hi My Name is John…and I am addicted to analytics as a story · 116 points
HN discussionGaug.es uses Mongo. Its data model is pretty simple (just counters), but he has blogged about the approach in detail. MongoDB Counters: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/06/28/counters-every... http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/07/31/counters-every... Kestrel: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2012/03/05/misleading-tit... Gets some decent traffic and works well. http://twitter.com/jnunemaker/status/2821…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2012/03/05/misleading-title-about-queueing/
on “Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy”Submitted Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks as a story · 90 points
HN discussionNew does travel quick. I was just reading about this thing this morning. http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-... So John in the above link was talking about how when you scale, you end up looking at bottlenecks, which are usually slow data accesses, and moving them into some sort of key-value store--that usually are based on a key-value access pattern. So by the time you're well into scaling…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-in-performant-systems/
on “Toy Store: ORM for Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Memcached, darn near anything”Submitted Creating an API as a story · 42 points
HN discussionThere's a better article on the rationale here: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-in-performant-systems
on “Toy Store: ORM for Riak, Redis, Cassandra, Memcached, darn near anything”Submitted Give Yourself Constraints as a story · 30 points
HN discussionOne pain point I've had since switching from Basic Auth has the lack of debugging via a terminal and curl. That was pretty useful. For Ruby-minded folks there's http://github.com/marcel/twurl which is effectively curl that uses OAuth - though it isn't the same. John Nunemaker wrote a tutorial on how to get get up and running with OAuth pretty quickly (though it is for the Ruby/Rails audience) http://railstips.org/bl…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2009/03/29/oauth-explained-and-what-it-is-good-for/
on “I think Twitter’s OAuth-only Access is a Waste of Time”Submitted You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku as a story · 23 points
HN discussionI've been using MongoDB to rewrite the activity feed on one of my apps. I wouldn't use it for everything though (not just yet anyway). Having said that, the guys behind Harmony ( http://get.harmonyapp.com/ ) use MongoDB for everything, as far as I know: http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/12/18/why-i-think-mo...
Comment linking /blog/archives/2009/12/18/why-i-think-mongo-is-to-databases-what-rails-was-to-frameworks/
on “Ask HN: What's the current state of NoSQL ?”Submitted Data Modeling in Performant Systems as a story · 10 points
HN discussionIf you're in Ruby land, consider Isaac (nice demo at http://railstips.org/2008/11/14/sinatra-for-irc ) or Autumn ( http://github.com/RISCfuture/autumn/tree/master ). Isaac is particularly syntactically appealing.
Comment linking /2008/11/14/sinatra-for-irc
on “Yardbird - building IRC bots with Django”Submitted Plugins and Extending Ruby Code, Examples from MongoMapper Plugin System as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSame here. http://railstips.org/ is always a great place for Rails, well, tips from John Nunemaker. There's 74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials: http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/74-ruby-on-rails-r... (not sure if this is dated or not) 19 Rails Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know: http://www.rubyinside.com/19-rails-tricks-most-rails-coders-... Mashable's 20+ Tools for RoR Development: http://mas…
Comment linking /
on “Useful PHP Tools”Submitted What Is The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work? as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> Every time I try to learn programming, it feels painfully slow compared to other things I've picked up. It's probably slow because you're not having fun with it. You're probably not having fun with it because you're not solving a compelling goal. Ask yourself whether you're learning "just to learn it" or are you trying to solve a problem and this particular language/api/compiler/implementation will help you achiev…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2010/01/12/i-have-no-talent/
on “Ask HN: When does programming start to make sense?”Submitted Booleans are Baaaaaaaaaad as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis is sort of a link dump but with some clicking around you should find some good stuff. Good luck! http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts http://railsforzombies.org/ http://www.workingwithrails.com/ http://www.railsmentors.org/ http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/12/rails-3-cheat-sheets/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-ra... http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/
Comment linking /blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/
on “Ask HN: learning Ruby/Rails”Submitted Whois for Ruby Gems as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI'm not sure what your age has to do with this submission, I know a guy who wrote a simple operating system with 15 and never put his age online just to get 'real feedback' as he put it. Edit: After looking at the code it also becomes apparent that you did not write an "XML-to-JSON converter" but just put a (very simple) web-frontend in front of the crack-library. ( http://www.railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/04/01/…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2009/04/01/crack-the-easiest-way-to-parse-xml-and-json/
on “XML to JSON Converter. By a 15 year old.”Submitted HTTParty (Rails HTTP lib) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWarning, link dump ahead. Start with: http://tryruby.org/ Then try: http://railsforzombies.org/ Other people have asked the same thing and received helpful answers: http://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/dchql/what_is_a_great... http://ask.metafilter.com/165590/Rapid-Ruby-on-Rails-indoctr... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-ra... Free programming books here, there are some RoR examples: http…
Comment linking /blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/
on “Ask HN: How Can I Learn Ruby on Rails?”Submitted MongoMapper 0.8: Goodies Galore as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Google Analytics Fun as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Counters Everywhere, Storing Stats in MongoDB as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
