IdolHands.com :: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek
Sometimes in the throes of Rails development you need to remember what attributes a given model has. Of course there are many ways to do this, but I've found one that's quite fast.
You could look at your migration for the model, but you'd have to ensure that its attributes weren't changed by subsequent migrations. You could look at schema.rb, but that would be a file open + a search.
If you're like me you always have a Terminal session open while you're coding and debugging. I typically have four tabs open: the first for script/server output, the second for script/console, the third for autospec, and the final one for filesystem and/or git operations.
So just switch over to your script/console window and type the model name, and you'll get a nice dump of what the object looks like: