Maybe Heroku changed something, or maybe it's the new Cedar stack, but using private gems from Github is pretty easy. It apparently didn't work before. The important part is in your ~/.ssh/config Host heroku.com ForwardAgent yes After that it's no big deal. Just use an ssh URL to Github (or wherever, the Github part doesn't really matter) in your Gemfile and off you go! source :rubygems ruby '1.9.3' gem 'sinatra', :git => 'git@github.com:darkhel…

Instead of doing the standard 9-5 salary based job, it's popular in the software development world to work as a contractor, or freelancer.1 Right now, I do the 9-5 thing. I'm learning it's because of one major fact. I'd be terrible at it It comes down to the fact that as a contractor, you have no control over the environment. The company paying you doesn't use git? Too bad. Git, but no GitHub? So sad. Test-unit when you love rspec? Why don't I g…

You need to start caring about a few things. Now. Code style Looking through code, you see all sorts of things. Some of them are good. Some of them are downright amazing pieces of code. Some of them are horrible. Some of them are so bad you feel your grip tensing around the keyboard and you have to restrain yourself so you don't snap the bloody thing in half. They might be bad decisions. They might be caused by someone who didn't have the knowle…

Ever been working on a project for a while, then go work on something else, then come back after a few weeks? Sure you have. Ever come back and somebody deleted your nice nginx config file you had in there for your local dev server? Ever wonder where the hell it went? Well wonder no more! I had this happen a couple days ago. Somebody deleted my nginx.conf file. It was just gone. Find it! First things first, I had to find the file. A little bit o…

A copy merge is basically where you take all of their changes. Say you're in branch A and want to merge in branch B. Their might be conflicts, but you don't care, as you want whatever is in branch B. Almost as if you are copying from B to A. Since you are in branch A, it is referred to as ours. Branch B is referred to as theirs. In git land, you can do this, assuming you are in branch A: git merge -s recursive --strategy-option theirs B This wil…

Sometimes you do silly things. Like check big binary files into source control. Ones that shouldn't be in source control. This causes problems. Okay, well not really problems, but it has some effects. Cloning the repository takes longer, of course, since there are big files, and other operations can take longer too. But fret not! If you need to purge files from Git, you can. Now, you can't just remove the file, since it's still technically in th…

There are a lot of hosted source control providers out there. Github, bitbucket, cvsdude, ProjectLocker, Codaset, SourceForge, Codeplex, Google Code, Beanstalk, and I could probably keep going until all 5 of you stopped reading my blog. Personally, I'm a Github kind of guy. From the looks of things, I would also enjoy Codaset or bitbucket. We use cvsdude at CodeBaby, and while it gets the job done, it's not something I'd use otherwise. First, th…

Create a branch locally, and push it to origin: git checkout -b branchname git push origin branchname Get at that branch from elsewhere: git checkout -t -b branchname origin/branchname

Adam Wiggins hooked me up with the Heroku stuff (and by hooked up, I mean I emailed Heroku support and he enabled the services for me), and so I moved my professional online presence to be hosted on Heroku. The URL is the same as before (http://www.darkhax.com), but now it should be just a bit snappier, and easier for me to deploy to. If you haven't at least checked out Heroku by visiting the site, do so now.

Speaking of git, you can get it on Windows, using msysgit. It works pretty well, in that I haven't had any problems with it, except some minor line ending things. msysgit Getting Started with Git and GitHub on Windows - Kyle Cordes

It's an older talk, but it's still awesome. If you've never heard of git before, check it out.