As far as accomplishments go, 2007 has been a good year. I joined FreshBooks in April (it’s been great), had my first academic paper published in August, and was chosen to participate in next year’s SXSW Interactive. On top of that, this blog reached 100 readers over the summer – thanks you guys.

Speaking of which, the only real down note is how I’ve labored with this blog these past few months. I’ve had article ideas bouncing around in my head, but the most important step – writing them out – has totally eluded me. So, my first resolution for next year is to rediscover my writing touch and whip this blog back into shape.

My other resolutions? Write more code for the hell of it, build something with merb, and contribute to a proper open source project. I’ve shared plenty of half-baked code here on my blog, but I’d like to get involved with a project with legs – whether I’m writing docs, test cases, or patches, it’s all good. (Looking for help? Drop me a line.)

So here’s to a new year – may it be a good one.

My name’s Ben Vinegar, and I’m a software developer stationed in Toronto, Canada. Right now I happen to be working for FreshBooks, an online invoicing start-up.

Although FreshBooks is primarily 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 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

I’m working on getting a contact form set up – in the meantime, please feel free to comment on my blog, or leave a post on the FreshBooks Forums.