I recently had the opportunity to talk at the DC Ruby User’s Group about how we use Vagrant in our web development projects.  My slides are available here.  The short version is that Vagrant provides a virtualized development environment.  This doesn’t mean you have to write everything using vi or Emacs in a shell (though I won’t judge you if you do that… some of my best friends use emacs…).  Vagrant...

We recently ran into an issue precompiling assets in Rails 3.1 for production. By default, Rails 3.1′s rake:assets:precompile task jams assets into a /assets directory. This works for simple deployments, but when deployed in Tomcat (or most application containers) some root context is applied to the application path. For example – when running against rails server the URL to your application might look something...

Element 84 is pleased to welcome Patrick Quinn to the crew! He’s getting ready to roll his sleeves up on a couple of new projects that we’re spinning up and we’re glad to have him aboard. Welcome Patrick!!