New Rails handles a lot of timezone stuff for you. Set the appropriate time zone for the request and get an object from the DB, it’s created_at date will be translated from UTC to the request’s time zone.

Rails apps love flash messages. Little notes providing information, confirmation or warnings to the user. Typically implemented in a partial like so:

Four years baby. Soon the blog will be toting a lunch pail and school bag, off to decades of education. Next thing I know, my little baby will be married and have little blogs of its own. Blog, you grow up so fast!

So there’s a Category that has many Expenses. The expenses for a category are destroyed when the category is destroyed. Elsewhere in my logic I would like to know if the category is removable based on whether it has any expenses and, if it does, whether any of the expenses it has are greater than zero.

This morning I spent a good while hashing on a problem in some new code I’m updating for a freelance project. I added a couple callbacks to an ActiveRecord model, and things that previously worked were broken. Unfortunately there were no errors in the model or exceptions in the system to give me a hint as to what went wrong. When I finally uncovered the problem, I was thankful that it was something I had never run into before.