"The claim is that by avoiding the daylight hours, fewer customers will be impacted by the rollout.  Problem 1: You presume there will be problems that impact availability.  You have no confidence in your code quality; or (or maybe, and), you have no confidence in your infrastructure and deployment process.  If you lack confidence that your new system is ready for production, you probably shouldn’t be pushing it to production!"

Useful notes on the modern way of deploying Rails applications with Bundler and Capistrano.

"The Passenger preference pane is a preference pane for Mac OS X, it enables you to configure a Rails or Rack application in a matter of seconds." It does. It's very good.

"A frequent question people ask us is “how do I transfer my database between my local workstation and my Heroku app?”" The answer is: using taps. Database push/pull, to/from Heroku, and to/from different database vendors. Very, very clever.

Tom's been poking Heroku, and now, so have I. It's proper brilliant: a rackup file, a tiny Sinatra app, and the Heroku gem, and you're building webapps in ten minutes. It's crazy and brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing of which we need more of.

Some well-worn tales here, but also some good new ones, particularly when it comes to query-profiling and all forms of caching.

SixApart's MySQL DBA shares some thoughts on running tight ops ships. Lots of good wisdom in here.

"SwitchPipe is a proof of concept "Web application server" or, more accurately, a Web application process manager and request proxy." Wow. Peter Cooper comes good on his "RBoss" concept. Could be interesting to see if there's mileage in this.

"This free, open source LAMP production stack for RedHat Enterprise Edition, CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu will allow users to quickly put Rails applications on production servers."

Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Apart from the fact the whole lighttpd/fastcgi stack is a bit old-hat, some useful reminders for those of use not so used to Debian...

I think this has been updated. Worth bookmarking, anyhow.

strip-request-uri is your friend, it seems...

If this is as good as Geoffrey's other screencasts, it'll be very useful for me to crack my Capistrano-fear...

Awesome selection of tips, and some new plugins I'd not heard of. Lots to take stock off.

What it says on the tin. Could be very, very useful...

I decided to make my presentation a call to action to, once and for all, put a big fat finger in FastCGI’s eye and move on.

Because, you know, at some point I'm going to have to dive into using them quite hard...

Locking the core Rails gems' versions. Useful, if it's still valid syntax (Rails moves a lot in a year)