My name’s Ben Vinegar, and I’m a software developer at FreshBooks, an online invoicing start-up, located here in Toronto, Canada.

Although FreshBooks is a PHP shop, my first (serious) taste of web programming began with Ruby on Rails, which I still practice on the side. Ruby is also my defacto language for handling most of life’s little tasks; it’s a fantastic tool, and never ceases to surprise me – in a good way.

The blog

On this blog, I generally write Ruby-related tutorials for various libraries and tools I encounter. Occasionally I write about the Toronto technology scene, where I regularly occasionally attend DemoCamp, BarcampToronto and Rails Pub Nite events.

Technology behind the site

This blog is powered by Mephisto, a Rails blogging engine written by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer. It’s a great little app if you’re familiar with Rails, but Wordpress will spare you a lot of grief.

It’s served using Mongrel, proxied through Lighttpd. I’d use Apache, but Lighttpd has a nice small memory footprint; great for my resource-scarce VPS.

Speaking of which, this whole wacky getup is hosted on a 256 mb “Slice”, running Ubuntu. I’ve been using Slicehost for a year now, and have been totally impressed with their service.

Contacting me

If you’d like to get a hold of me, the best bet is by e-mail: