This post is part of a series called Open Source Citizenry in which we discuss ways to eliminate the barriers that developers and companies face to fully participating in the open source community.

There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding the changes to Rails 3.1. It started with an epic GitHub commit thread and the discussion exploded again in the past few days after What the Hell is Hapenning to Rails and Yehuda’s response thereto. I’m going to address the issue from a...

One of the first things that anyone has to do in an application is assign instance variables in controllers for use in views, etc. This pattern, while dead simple, has a number of possible implementations that each have their aesthetic benefits and drawbacks. At RailsConf I had the opportunity to...

I had the opportunity to speak at RailsConf 2011 about OmniAuth, outlining some of the reasoning behind it as well as some current and upcoming features of Intridea’s own “authenticate with anything” middleware. While the session wasn’t video recorded, a little trick I’ve picked up is to run a screencasting...