for those of us using dynamic languages like ruby, make a habit of hitting Ctrl+Shift+V (Validate Syntax in TextMate) or your editor's equivalent. That will catch the dumbest of all errors (missing parens, block terminators, string terminators, etc). alternatively you can add a validate_syntax step to your deployment strategy and just run something like >> ruby -c whatever.rb on files that are part of the most recent commit.