Recently I had a need to implement an on-demand payment model with a payment processor (Cybersource). I use the Active Merchant plugin for transaction operations almost exclusively, and nobody had added support for Cybersource subscriptions or on demand payments. So I implemented it myself over the last couple days, and published the code on github .

Currently it supports creating subscriptions, updating subscriptions (which is also how you cancel), and preforming a purchase (auth+capture) via subscription. I’m willing to implement other things like credits, straight auths and captures if there’s a community need. There’s not much in the way of docs yet (like most of Active Merchant), but it’s working for me. I’d also be willing to write a post on using the features I added, just drop a not in the comments if you would like to see that.

I’ll be submitting a patch soon, and hopefully this will get pulled into the official ActiveMerchant repository. This is the first real open source contribution we’ve made at ELEVATION (most things we need we find are already done), and it feels good to give back. You should try it.

I’ve been hesitant to explore git since subversion was (I thought) really handling all my needs just fine. Why waste time learning another version control workflow?

Over time, I started to realize there were things about git that would be really nice, like nice branching and merging in particular, but I thought, that’s for some day when I have time to learn it, or my pain becomes too great with branches (which I don’t use that often in svn).

Just a couple days ago I needed to extend some code that was hosted on github, so I forked it, cloned it, and just started to work. In that process I’m discovering things that are just making git start to click. Whoops, didn’t mean to commit that yet: git-reset. I need to pull in some other changes, but can’t yet because I have uncommitted changes: git-stash.

Combined with the git bundle for textmate, I’m actually having fun learning git.

Moral: Try new stuff (in a real-life scenario), it’s fun and can make your life better.

A big topic at railsconf this year was hosting , deployment and scaling of apps. Talks and sessions on these topics were everywhere, not to mention Engine Yard getting pimped left and right (No, I won’t wear your tshirt). I found it extremely ironic then, when Michael Koziarski said in the closing keynote (paraphrased):

Deployment is a word you shouldn’t have to know.

I couldn’t agree more. I want to be as removed from the details of how to deploy and scale an application as possible. I want to focus on writing software that meets my customer’s needs, and the rest is details.

I think mod_rails is a big step in that direction. I think those guys are awesome, but I’m certainly not interested in writing improvements to garbage collectors to make ruby faster. It’s just not my bag. The more time I have to spend worrying about and managing deployment, the less time I’m spending “investing in myself” as DHH put it, and solving problems for my customers. It’s good to know that there are smart people out there working on how to scale applications, but I just don’t want to have to concern myself with it. Most of the apps I write are pretty small anyway, and when I meet the need to seriously scale, I’ll pay someone else to do it. Software like mod_rails is allowing me to survive even longer on a VPS (we use slicehost) so I can spend my time doing what I do best.