This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.
Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:
getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
// the rest of your code goes here.
by Jonathan Rochkind, http://bibwild.wordpress.com
Capistrano automates pushing out a new version of your application to a deployment location.
I've been writing and deploying Rails apps for a while, but I avoided using Capistrano until recently. I've got a pretty simple one-host deployment, and even though everyone said Capistrano was great, every time I tried to get started I just got snowed under not being able to figure out exactly what I wanted to do, and figured I wasn't having that much trouble doing it "manually".