Tools For Software Projects
In the last couple of years I have worked as an employee and as a freelancer doing software development with Ruby on Rails and Cocoa for the iPhone. The projects have been new projects started from...
View ArticleNode Knockout
This past weekend I participated in Node Knockout with three teammates: Paul Armstrong, Zach Johnson, and Nate Kadlac. Nate and I have worked together on Train Brain, I met Paul through work at a...
View ArticleEmail Service Providers for Rails
Sending email (transactional and marketing) is part of most every web application. At work our project is nearing its first public release and we are talking about emails the application may be...
View ArticleProcess monitoring with Bluepill
On our current project my colleague chose Bluepill for process monitoring. Bluepill has been working well so I wanted to recommend it and share some notes.
View ArticleSurge Conference
Surge Conference was held in Baltimore, MD in September 2010, put on by OmniTI. Some attendees compared it to the Velocity conference which also covers web performance, scalability, and operations.
View ArticlejQuery Conference 2010 Boston
jQuery Conference took place in Boston over two days in October. John Resig kicked it off with a keynote and the sessions generally covered testing and large-scale JavaScript applications, JQuery UI,...
View ArticleNotify Me
We recently started work on a new iPhone app and wanted to promote the app and find out who is interested in trying it out. Now that we've made progress on the app privately, it seemed like a good time...
View ArticleGetting started with A/Bingo and Rails 3
A/Bingo is a "A/B" or "split" testing framework to try out different text or images (or other things) and see how they perform relative to each other. Vanity is the another a/b testing option for Rails...
View ArticleA/B Testing with Vanity
Vanity is an A/B Testing framework for Ruby on Rails applications. I covered A/Bingo previously which is a similar framework. We have moved to Vanity at work as our A/B testing tool for a number of...
View ArticleBundler in practice
We recently deployed a Rails 3 application that uses Bundler to manage dependencies. We freeze the gems in the application so it can be deployed on the same boxes as other applications that have...
View Article10 iOS open source projects
Working independently on personal iOS projects, I'd used a couple of Objective-C open source libraries and wanted to share what they are.
View ArticleFacebook Timeline JS API development tips
Facebook has a JS SDK and "open graph" which allow applications to post to users' newsfeeds (and more) with permission from the user. Timeline was announced at the Facebook developer conference in the...
View ArticleShip it quicker
Shipped software can provide A/B test results and behavior data, which can help clarify whether a feature is worth enhancing or abandoning. It is important for the team to embrace shipping software...
View ArticleWorking with large amounts of data using MySQL
MySQL LOAD DATA INFILE can be used to load thousands or millions of records very quickly. Each row in a CSV text file will be created as a record in the database.
View ArticleCropping an image programmatically
Imagemagick is an image manipulation library that supports the ability to crop an image programmatically. There is a creative aspect to making a crop from an original image. A photo producer may be...
View ArticleEdit the filename of the current buffer in vim
This blog is generated from text files that are comprised of a section of YAML code then markdown-formatted text. To convert the text files for use with new blog software I had to edit each filename...
View ArticleGetting started with tmux
I started learning tmux and highly recommend the book tmux: Productive Mouse-Free Development [^book] as a guide. My tmux.conf [^conf] configuration file is available as well.
View ArticleHow to code review a repository with github
Recently I was asked to do a code review on an entire repository. Normally I review a pull request where I can leave a comment on a specific line.
View ArticleUsing a Set in Ruby
A Set 1 is a useful collection and something I under-utilize in Ruby. A Set does not allow duplicates. Converting between a Set and an Array is easy. In the article A Guide to Ruby Collections, II:...
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