Welcome

You are at the portfolio and blog of Omar Qureshi. I'm a West Midlands based Ruby on Rails developer who specialises in large PostgreSQL backed applications. Here you can find details on past projects that I was involved with, details on development undertakings in my blog and also availability for freelance work.

ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

Getting ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII even though you have set your servers language as UTF-8? Read on!

RMagick on CentOS

Ever tried to install the latest version of the RMagick gem (or ImageMagick) on CentOS (x86_64)? No? Lucky you! If you are unfortunate enough to need to do it, continue reading.
More
Select x records per category in a table

Ever wanted to grab a certain number of records per category in a table without having to resort to a union query? Read about over partition by row_number()
More
PostgreSQL 9.0.4 on Lion (Clean Install)

Just done a clean install of Lion and are trying to get PostgreSQL back into working order? Fear no more, help is here!
More
One-liner to list all databases to backup

Just a simple one-liner to get a list of all the databases to backup - which should work for postgres 9.
More
tsearch2 for Rails applications

tsearch2 is a database backed fulltext search which is dependancy free (other than having postgres installed). If you ever want a simple search, this is probably the best way to go about it.
More
Using "or" in Mongoid

Ever wanted to do a complicated "or" query in Mongoid? Fear no more - here's how to go about it.
More

Work

I spent three and a half years as a developer at Scholastic as a Rails and PostgreSQL developer. Time-to-time I would be required to manage projects and consult with designers to assess whether something was technically possible within a given a timeframe and with the resources available.