Marcel Scherf » ruby

Announcing Railsfreelancer.org

Marcel Scherf — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:09:44 +0000

Some days ago I started railsfreelancer.org, which aims to become the leading resource for rails freelancers and people looking to hire great talent.

I already kicked the site off with a big bang, when the amazing rails freelancer Giles Bowkett was kind enough to give me an interview for railsfreelancer.org.

You can go there and sign up for the newsletter, follow railsfreelancer on twitter, become a fan of railsfreelancer on facebook and as a special bonus for rails freelancers: get featured on the site by answering a few questions.

Happy coding!

I am available for freelance work

Marcel Scherf — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:08:08 +0000

Since December of 2010 I am no longer employed by imedo and am now available for freelance work.

I am focused on full stack Ruby on Rails webdevelopment including backend, frontend (css, html, jquery, design etc.) and interested in long term contracts.

For more information check out: http://www.epicrails.com

Railswaycon is over

Marcel Scherf — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:20:49 +0000

And I took some notes. A larger post will follow here and on the imedo devblog
Overall it was fun. Good presentations, but the rooms were to small and there were not enough powerplugs.

RailswayCon 2009 Berlin

Marcel Scherf — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:41:09 +0000

Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I will be attending RailsWayCon 2009 in Berlin

Render partial with layout

Marcel Scherf — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:19:24 +0000

Just a quick tip:

It is possible to pass a :layout option to a render :partial call like this
<%= render :partial => 'some_list', :layout => 'list_widget' %>

Sending Email awesomely with Rails

Marcel Scherf — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:13:48 +0000

If you would like to send HTML Emails with all the bells and whistles that Actionpacks Actionview provides checkout my freshly released plugin awesome_email on github.

It will enable you to use layouts/templates for your HTML Emails and it will inline CSS information inside the HTML to make sure it works in almost all Email clients.

For more information see my blogpost on imedo’s devblog about awesome_email

Rails deployment made easy

Marcel Scherf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:44:52 +0000

There’s a new gem called passenger which makes it very easy to deploy your rails application on a Apache2 server. Here is the website of the project: Passenger

There’s also a short screencast you can watch to see how easy rails deployment can be: Passenger Screencast (the video is made by Ryan Bates from railscasts so the voice should sound familiar )

Galaxynomads

Marcel Scherf — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:29:52 +0000

As some might know, I’m writing on a new persistent browserbased game that is located in space.

On the galaxynomads development blog (which I can’t access at the moment, because I have no access to my old email account) I announced in November 2006 that I was going to develop it with Ruby on Rails. As time went by a few things came up and I found a great new job (day to day Rails development, yeay!) and I also moved to Berlin earlier this year.

So as you can imagine I haven’t had much free time to develop the game. I did some small things and all, but nothing really that good to show off really. Basically groundwork for all the game mechanics.

Last week I took a short leave and I could actually work on the game a bit. I built 2 prototypes of a hexagon tiled map, using some of the stuff I learned from looking at weewar.com and kdice.com which are also very popular and great browserbased games.

The first prototype didn’t work out so well so I started a new one by using a new approach. So the second time it really worked like I had expected it to. It isn’t pretty yet, but the basics work. The map has several layers with an imagemap on top. This is how it looks so far:

It highlights all the surrounding hex tiles when you hover over one tile and shows what map points (extra money points or capture points i.e.) and units are currently inside the tile. You can also click on the map to activate a certain tile.

I used jQuery for the DOM stuff this time, because it’s a very nice lightweight alternative to prototype and scriptaculous. So far I haven’t run into any issues.

If there are any developers or designers interested in joining the game making process feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you.