If you're doing database seeding in a rails app through seeds.rb you might be interested in this snippet, especially if you're using CSV files to help you do it.

Update: Thanks to SDude, zibuki, bilke, and Anthony Goddard for helping to keep this post up-to-date and working.

For those of you out there doing development, you've probably run into some or all of the following problems:

• Your development environment doesn't mirror your production environment.
• It's difficult or impossible to keep everyone's development environment consistent in multi-developer projects.
• You can never remember how to get all the configuration nuances right for whatever dependencies your project requires.
• It takes real, significant amounts of time to get yourself ready to go when starting or switching projects.
• The dependencies of one project might conflict with another project.

These issues kill your productivity with time-consuming and difficult-to-isolate issues that have nothing to do with the problem you actually want to solve. To get around these issues and give ourselves some other advantages (more on that later) we're using a gem called Vagrant to create a portable development environment.

We've let our blog languish for a long time now -- while talking about the reasons behind that, one thing that kept coming up is that it didn't seem like it was part of our normal workflow. In an attempt to remedy some of that, we've switched over from Blogger to Jekyll (via Github Pages).