Last night was our monthly Hackfest at the Quick Left offices. This month we did a little something different (and had quite a few extra guests), which turned out to be a smashing success.

We've been standing up a lot of Sinatra apps lately to provide small sets of functionality on top of mostly static JS application stacks. This seems to be a really helpful method at providing a tiny Ruby footprint for utilities, but otherwise building out a majority of your application in other places. One problem I've encountered lately is how dirty it feels to serve static files in Sinatra apps. Version 1.3.0 of Rack seems to be offering a decent solution.

Recently, I had to add some S3 backed image functionality into a Rails application that is accessed through a small Sinatra proxy. Based on the setup, I decided to handle the image uploading at the proxy level instead of in the Rails stack. What I wanted was a way to utilize CarrierWave and its helper methods inside the Sinatra proxy even though I didn't have a database layer or any model classes in that stack. Here's how I did it...