Going remote is a appealing, but it’s easy to get lost. What’s the right balance between professional and personal life? How to make sure that you’ll finish your tasks by the end of the day? You can get it right without too much effort. Here’s my recipe for my last three years of remote working.

The missing part of all the Ruby web frameworks is the distinction between views and templates. Keeping things separated, helps to declutter templates and models from presentation logic. Also, since views are objects they are easily testable. If you ever used Mustache, you are already aware of the advantages. Lotus::View is based on these simple concepts.

MRuby is a lightweight Ruby. It was created by Matz with the purpose of having an embeddable version of the language. This article covers how to enable Redis scripting with Ruby.

[ I wrote this post for Redis ToGo, you can find the original article here and the related discussion on Hacker News. ]

Redis Store aims to be a toolkit for your Ruby applications, it natively supports sharding, master/slave replication, marshalling, timeouts and namespaces. Plus, it’s really easy to use with the most popular frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails.

If you love modularity, you will love Redis Store too: under the hood it just activates, at runtime, the best set of low level features requested by the above software layers. It’s delivered as a set of gems, one for each targeted framework, with a common background that’s the redis-store gem itself. This decision helped me a lot to deal with different versions of Ruby, several frameworks, and versions.

I’m currently working as a consultant for an UN agency (IFAD) and we have a portfolio of ~15 Rails apps, developed in the last four years. The environment is heterogeneous and an half dozen of these projects are interfacing with legacy software and they are legacy themselves. As counterpart, the new apps we are developing are running on the latest bleeding edge technologies (Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.2, MongoDB, Redis, WebSockets etc..).