A few notes on tonite's RailsMN presentation

notes.md

Thanks for coming everyone! I had a fun time, and I hope you got something out of my rather disorganized ramble, perhaps just a sense of how you can play with things.

I want to repeat some of the information in case you missed it.

Pry is at http://pryrepl.com, on github at https://github.com/pry/pry.

Conrad Irwin's talk on Pry is probably essential, I did it absolutely no justice at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9j_Mf91M0I

The three gems I said to include:

group :development, :test do
  gem "jazz_hands" # brings in pry and several of it's buddies to make a really great rails console
  gem "better_errors" # gives you a really nice rails error display, with a built in repl in your browser
  gem "quiet_assets" # stop seeing those 40 GET requests in your logs for all the stylesheets, javascripts, favicons, and so on
end

Finally, although there's really no more value in it, the prezi that gave a pretty visual backdrop to my introduction: http://prezi.com/5x_kxihbietd/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Update: April 26, 2015

Time marches on, gems come and go, and entropy wields it's might force.

I no longer install jazz_hands -- instead I now always install these:

1. pry-rails -- installs pry and a few others, and makes pry the rails console.
2. pry-byebug -- debugging in pry (byebug is the debugger for the newer versions of ruby, > 2.1)
3. pry-nav -- provides useful navigation around code during debugging.

Listing these also brings in pry, byebug, and a few other useful things.