Hi,
I'm Brian Tsai, a developer-entrepreneur living in Tokyo. I started up an educational online company with some friends in 2000 (http://iknow.jp), and am working on another HR related one now.
I'm posting a couple of the tools or side projects I've been working on, in case it helps others.
Rails I18n is an adequate solution, but managing the translation yml files is a true PITA. Here's a different way of managing our translations, while still working within the Rails standard framework.
I couldn't find a free API in Japan that allowed looking up postal codes to get addresses, so I wrote a parser to generate key-value lookup hashes based on the text files that the Japan Post Office issues regularly.
If you're using Sass for your css, you'll soon discover that the Rails asset pipeline comes to a grinding halt when your Sass library grows. It can't helped - the Sass compiler is Ruby based.
Hampton Catlin (original creator of Sass) has worked with others to create a C++ port of the Sass compiler which is magnitudes of order faster. If you combine this with Live Guard, you get lightning fast compiling with automatic reloading in the browser without refreshing the page.
I put together a base Rails project that combines all of these elements so you can see how the parts work together before you incorporate it into your own project.
I got tired of squinting and trying to figure out if the wonderful Font-Awesome icons I was searching for was the right one, so I added a bit of CSS and JS to make it easier to find the right icon for me. Give if a spin or view it on github.