• Bugs are addressed the way they are right now, but developers need to first create a test that fails due to the bug. This makes regression testing easier (which I'm guessing based on what you've said is a huge problem for your QA department), and after a few months, the hotspots in your code will have decent coverage.
  
• New code is developed using TDD.
  
• Half a day every week is solely devoted to reducing technical debt. I'd personally handle this by allowing devs to work on whatever they want - they will probably have the best idea where the problem spots in the code are.
  

enki42 fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Jul 14, 2011

<ul>
  <%= check_box_tag 'items[]', 1 %> Item 1
  <%= check_box_tag 'items[]', 2 %> Item 2
</ul>

<%= submit_tag "Delete" %>
<%= submit_tag "Archive" %>

items = Foo.find(params[:items])

# :commit is the default name of submit buttons in rails.
case params[:commit]
when 'Delete'
  items.delete_all
when 'Archive'
  items.archive_all
end

enki42 fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Aug 30, 2011

• Extract a backup from Heroku
  
• Import the backup into a staging database on your local machine
  
• Set the site id on all multitenanted tables to whatever site id you're working with
  
• Repeat for each of your clients
  

• Command-P (or Ctrl-P on win / linux) is way more powerful than you think. After you've located a file you want, hit ":" to jump to a particular line number in that file or "@" to find a method by its name (works fine for ruby, haven't tried in much else).
  
• Command-Shift-P can run pretty much every command that Sublime text is capable of. Just hit it and type what you want to do. I use this all the time with the Git plugin to see a list of changed files, add commits, etc. without needing to leave sublime text.
  
• Command-Ctrl-P switches projects (take a few minutes to set up projects, they're awesome.) The amazing thing is you can leave one project and switch to another, and when you switch back, all your unsaved files, open files, etc. are still there and your cursor is even in the same place)
  
• Hit Cmd and click in a bunch of places to make multiple selections. This is great when you need to modify the same thing in a bunch of different places
  
• If you're in a find dialog, and you need to rename 20 instances of a variable, find it, hit Alt-Enter, now every instance of the variable is selected and you can edit them at the same time.
  

• Create two heroku applications, live and deployment. Modify deployment to point to live's database.
  
• Push all changes up to deployment, and migrate from there. (There is a seam here if the migrations themselves aren't compatible with live, but in most cases like adding columns this is usually fine)
  
• Smoke test deployment, and make sure the dynos are up and running.
  
• Switch over the domains (on heroku, not DNS) to the deployment application
  
• Push to live, smoke test it, and switch the domains back when everything is looking good.
  

• Starting with the system ruby until someone screams at them about how that's a horrible idea.
  
• Downloading XCode for hours unless they were lucky enough to find something on the developer tools that don't require a full XCode install.
  
• Hopefully figuring out that they need homebrew and not one of the more old-school package managers.
  
• Be utterly confused about why people keep screaming at each other about how either RVM or rbenv are horrible and you should never use one or the other.
  
• Hopefully find a recent guide and know that the version of ruby they need to install is 1.9.3.
  
• (Fast forward two weeks) Wonder why they include the normal scripts in the first place when every single command ever needs "bundle exec" in front of it.