January 2012
4 posts
Agile Undefined by Andy Hunt
At Ruby Midwest, Andy Hunt gave a great keynote talk about the definition of Agile: Agile Undefined I remember back when I first started practicing “Agile”, and understanding to be Agile is to embrace change. In this talk, Andy defocuses on practice and re-emphasizes embracing change. It definitely brought up some questions that are worth addressing with my team. We meet...
Jan 27th
Nano v1.2.x Document Update Handler Support v1.2.x
nano and server side document updates I would like to announce that nano a nodejs couchdb driver now supports CouchDb Document Update Handlers nano is a minimalistic couchdb driver for nodejs https://github.com/dscape/nano CouchDb Document Update Handler is a way to add partial updates to couchdb documents via server side updates. This means that you do not have to first get the whole...
Jan 18th
Ruby Quicktips: Prevent rdoc and ri installation... →
rubyquicktips: When installing a gem the process that often takes the longest is generating the ri and RDoc documentation. If you want to prevent this from happening every time a gem gets installed (either manually or through Bundler), create (or open) a .gemrc file in ~/.gemrc or /etc/gemrc and add the…
Jan 4th
6 notes
How Github does process →
This is a great talk on how github does application development process!
Jan 4th
December 2011
4 posts
The rise and rise of JavaScript →
Dec 20th
7 notes
2 tags
Federal CIO proposes to adopt Cloud and Modular...
On Dec 9, 2011, the Chief Information Officer of the US released a 25 point plan to reform Government IT: http://www.cio.gov/documents/25-point-implementation-plan-to-reform-federal%20it.pdf Here are some highlights of the document: Turnaround or terminate at least one-third of underperforming projects in IT portfolio within the next 18 months Shift to “Cloud First” policy . Each agency...
Dec 19th
2 notes
NodeJs CLI get-post 0.1.0 released!
New Release of get-post! Verson 0.1.0 This version refines the api and now the library can be used via command line or inside a node module. How to use get-post? Using the “GET” command is easy, and simply returns json from the endpoint. Once installed via global node modules path, then you should be able to open a terminal and type: get And receive this: Just...
Dec 19th
CoffeeScript Opener
codeschool: The CoffeeScript course is almost done, and thanks to the awesome skills of Jingle Master Everett Simpson and Video Guru Oliver Tosh, I give you the opener for the course.  Expect the course to be released in the next week or two.  Feel free to embed this video and pass it around: View on YouTube
Dec 8th
4 notes
November 2011
5 posts
TJ Holowaychuk: Connect 1.8.0 - multipart support →
tjholowaychuk: Connect 1.8.0 is a tiny but substantial release because it adds multipart/form-data support via Felix Geisendörfer’s fantastic multipart parser formidable, it’s great and chances are you’re already using it! The bodyParser() middleware now unifies multipart, json, and x-www-form-urlencoded…
Nov 25th
16 notes
Open Source (Almost) Everything →
dhotson: Tom Preston-Werner talks about open sourcing all the things!
Nov 25th
1 note
Need an image? Check out http://jpg.to
Jpg.to is a web service that returns an image of whatever you prefix the URL with. For example: Http://sweet.jpg.to Returns NICE! Github jackhq twilson63 Should be a great service for blogs and slides, no more searching for basic images. I don’t have any other details, so use at your own risk. But, what a cool idea!
Nov 21st
AceBug - Supports CoffeeScript and Vim
AceBug The AceBug Plugin for Firefox and Firebug supports CoffeeScript and Vim. # Once Installed # Open the Console and press shift-enter to get a prompt >> lang=cf #> CoffeeScript is now enabled to debug on the client. Nice!
Nov 19th
MySQL - Cool Trix - REGEXP
MySQL REGEXP using like in mysql works great for querying records that starts with, ends with or contains some data. But what if you want to find several records that could start with ABC or start with BCD. MySql has a neat little function in the where clause that allows you to provide a regular expression to filter your query result. select * from widgets where name REGEXP 'foo|bar' This...
Nov 14th
October 2011
5 posts
4 tags
Good Talk on how to think about Application... →
Micah Martin and Robert C Martin, give a great and entertaining talk on how they worked through building an application. They built the application in the context of abstracting the UI and Data Layers, then focusing on the Business Logic layer, with TDD they were able to build the entire business logic layer, then the connect the data layer, and finally the UI Layer. Often times we get...
Oct 24th
Experiences of how to get started programming →
Robert Pearce did an excellent a talk at BarCampCHS yesterday. He shared his experience of going from 0 to professional rails programmer. And he created this site this awesome site. Not only does it contain links to resources he used, but it also contains the approaches he took. He started writing tests first in capybara and ruby. Really cool stuff! If you want to learn to program.check this...
Oct 23rd
Oct 23rd
4 tags
Cloud9 IDE -> 0 to CODE in 5 minutes
Cloud9 IDE -> 0 to NODE in 5 minutes Build and deploy end to end Javascript Applications Cloud9IDE is an online application development environment. “Development as a Service”, it is free to get started and open-source. If you are constantly on the go or want to start learning NodeJs, Sproutcore, CoffeeScript, and other new javascript technologies, but don’t have the...
Oct 18th
6 notes
csv2json - experimental csv parser
Recently, I created a library called csvjs, which takes a comma separated file and parses it to an array of javascript objects. It works great for the files that I have needed to parse, but would like to see if it can handle the vast array of csv files out in the universe. Do you have some nasty csv files? Go to csv2json.herokuapp.com And upload your csv and get a json version back. ...
Oct 6th
September 2011
1 post
get-post - Simple JSON CLI
get-post is a little nodejs project that provides two command line applications: get and # post This applications allow you to get json from a server or post json to a server. It is that simple. get http://twitter.com/search.json?q=nodejs post http://echo-json.heroku.com '{"hello":"world"}' Pretty simple! YUUP! Why I got tired of writing curl -XPOST -d ‘…’ url...
Sep 27th
1 note
August 2011
2 posts
GetSkeleton - Fluid Grid and Responsive Web
Recently, we converted our company site to a Responsive Web Design, as an experiment to see how hard it would be to convert over. We first took a stab using some of the techniques in the Responsive Web Design book, which is awesome, and amazing the things they accomplish, but we had trouble working through the fluid grid part. The percents did not workout for us. So we really spent a few...
Aug 22nd
2 notes
3 tags
Ruby Sequel Toolkit - MSSQL with (TinyTDS) -...
Connecting to MSSQL from ruby has always been painful UnixOdbc, FreeTds, and TinyTds has really made the connections super easy. Using the Ruby Sequel Toolkit, you are able to create an active model like interface to legacy databases which may not follow the active record standards. class Store < Sequel::Model(:csstore) dataset.disable_insert_output! plugin :validation_helpers ...
Aug 14th
1 note
July 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Awesome CoffeeScript Idioms - Each, Map, Select,...
Languages like Python and Ruby have great built in idioms for collection management. JavaScript has some great libraries that also provide support for these idioms, like Underscore.js and JQuery With CoffeeScript, you can take advantage of comprehensions, and quickly build these idioms with no additional libraries. These idioms were pointed out in “The Little Book on CoffeeScript”...
Jul 31st
2 tags
We're Hiring!
We are looking for #rubyonrails developers that want to improve #healthcareIT and loves #chs or #phl http://jackhq.com/contact
Jul 19th
4 notes
vab3log: Five Reasons I like Google+ →
vab3: 1) The user interface is clean and easy to understand. 2) Privacy is step one. The first thing you do is add friends to a Circle. The circle allows you to control who sees each post. Facebook didn’t introduce groups until I had so many friends it seemed to hard to do. 3) Understandible…
Jul 19th
1 note
Rails 3.1 Hackfest next weekend on IRC and IRL! →
thechangelog: NEXT weekend this weekend, there’s going to be a hackfest for Rails 3.1! If you’ve wanted to contribute to Rails in the past but you were too intimidated, now you have a chance to get involved, meet your heros and make a few friends along the way! Members of the Rails core team as well as core contributors will be hanging out on IRC. Don’t hesitate to ask whatever questions you...
Jul 18th
23 notes
June 2011
5 posts
SocketStream →
A web framework that sends requests via web-sockets. Could it be a preview of the web frameworks of the future?
Jun 27th
jQueryMobile Workshop #convergese
(Fail) I was asked to give a workshop on jQueryMobile, which is a great mobile framework that recently went to beta, and I completely tanked the presentation. Several things caused it to go bad to worse, and I am truly sorry to everyone that attended and was hoping for awesomeness. It just did not happen, I would like to provide everyone that attended that class and anyone else who would...
Jun 27th
$.extend => update_attributes →
jQuery has a built-in update attributes method, I know extend is used to extend fn and jQuery for plugins, but it can also serve as a great way to update attributes on javascript objects. For example: If you have a object: x = { name: 'foobar', items: ['item1', 'item2'] } And you persisted the object to a Form, then when the user submits the form, you pull the params in to an object...
Jun 22nd
3 tags
Convert JavaScript to CoffeeScript
Rico Sta. Cruz created an awesome converter js2coffee. If you are planning to get into CoffeeScript, you have to check this page out. http://ricostacruz.com/js2coffee It will not craft CoffeeScript as well as if you did it by hand, but it is great to take some existing javascript and paste it in and see how it renders the CoffeeScript. I just went over the https://github.com/visionmedia...
Jun 5th
1 note
Fun Friday - OSS Contribution - Week 1 - Results
Goal Everyone make at least one contribution to an open source project. Results The results were not very successful, while everyone wanted to contribute, I did not properly prep the team for the event. Here are some reasons why we failed: Less than 24 hour notice - not enough time. Everyone took a lot of time shopping for a project. It takes time to get up to speed on policies and...
Jun 2nd
May 2011
13 posts
3 tags
CupCake - A #CoffeeScript #NodeJs App Generator
Check out CupCake Install npm install cupcake -g Usage cupcake my_awesome_app Source https://github.com/twilson63/cupcake ...
May 25th
Rails Best Practices - CodeSchool
Our entire team had the opportunity to complete the Rails Best Practices course from Code School. The course covered topics on all three components of the MVC architecture in Rails. The following are the most useful tips I gathered from each: Models attr_accessible: A well-known technique for locking down your model attributes, but worth the reminder… why not begin coding each model by...
May 23rd
3 tags
Code School - Rails Best Practices Review
The Code School ‘Rails Best Practices’ Super Deluxe Championship edition had me hooked from the beginning with the references to 1980’s arcade games. The videos were so entertaining to watch that I could not stop until the course was done. Taking the time to review concepts that are already familiar never hurts any one. The First 3 levels were exactly this. After...
May 22nd
2 notes
4 tags
html2haml.heroku.com up 670.01%
What a difference a year makes, html2haml.heroku.com was launched on 05-31-2009, and really picked up steam in October 2009. Almost 200 developers daily are using the simple tool to help convert html to haml. Is haml picking up traction? Recently, there was a solid debate between erb vs haml, on the new podcast Ruby Rogues. On the show, the preference from Haml or Erb was split down the...
May 22nd
4 notes
3 tags
Code School - Rails Best Practices Review
If you are anything like me visual and hands-on experience are two of the most effect methods of learning. Code School has taken these teaching methods a step further to offers a new intuitive and interactive learning experience through the use of video, slides, and chapter quizes that utilize the in-browser editor. I have taken both of the courses that are currently being offered: Rails for...
May 22nd
1 note
Rails Best Practices
The last few weeks, I have been going through the Rails Best Practices courses offered at www.codeschool.com. I have thoroughly enjoyed my experiences with this method of learning. I wish something like this had been developed when I was younger. The methods used to teach were definitely interesting. The beginning of each of the lessons was an old-school game with funny sounds effects. It had...
May 22nd
3 tags
Code School - Rails Best Practices Review
I am a big proponent of the learn by doing paradigm and the Rails Best Practices course from the guys at Code School is a really neat way to get familiar with rails development. I really enjoyed the light-hearted yet content packed screencasts that have the usual awesome production values from Envy Labs. I was even more impressed with the exercises at the end of the sections. The slick...
May 22nd
Code School - Rails Best Practices
Being a developer in a shop that primarily focuses on Ruby, Code School has proven to be an invaluable asset. The course helps bring our junior developers up to speed and is a welcome refresher for our senior developers. Barrett Little Jack Russell Software
May 22nd
"Code School: Rails Best Practices" – A Beginner’s...
by Robert Pearce Ruby, coupled with Ruby on Rails, has been the primary driving force in my life for the past six months, and Envy Labs has been there every step of the way. “Rails for Zombies,” my first encounter with Rails, attempted to teach me how to use Rails in a manner similar to how a parent might throw his or her child in the deep end of a pool in order for the child to learn how to...
May 22nd
SEVEN Ps
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Production As a Software (Engineer/Developer/Craftsman) it is very important to plan before you develop! As a developer you are responsible for the quality of your code. Your code must deliver two different products: Working Feature or Application Well constructed, easy to understand source code This means that developers build and write at the...
May 22nd
NTS: NPM package.json format
Node Package Manger Npm has a json config file that help defines the nodejs libraries for distribution. This package.json file can also be used in projects to document dependencies for your nodejs project. This short article is a note to self document on how to do this. { "name": "Project Name", "description": "Project Description.", "version": "0.0.1", "homepage": "http://#", ...
May 19th
Adding Riak Node to a Cluster
Riak Clusters First install erlang and riak http://wiki.basho.com/Installation-and-Setup.html When setting up a new node for the riak cluster there are a couple of things you need to do before you start your node. in the rel/riak/etc directory Modify app.config to contain servers ip address or domain name Change the http node to point to this server ip address. Modify vm.args Change the...
May 19th
Brainstorming Meetings - Walk this WAY!
For the last few weeks we have started a new policy, that is very odd, different and strange for a group of web developers. Instead of squeezing into a conference room, or hovering around whiteboards, or projectors. We have taken our story/brainstorming meetings outdoors. It is a well known fact that when we humans are moving and walking around, we are able to think clearer and...
May 1st
April 2011
9 posts
JSON PIPE - Formatting JSON on the Command Line →
Apr 30th
Github enables Syntax Color to your Project Readme...
Github, just rolled out another awesome feature, now you can easily add colorized code examples in your readme, also you don’t have to create four spaced blocks for your code. Read More Here is my markdown: And here is my readme on github: SWEET! It would be awesome if tumblr and other blogs followed this example and would make it much easier to add code snippets and examples into...
Apr 20th
Apr 19th
Apr 19th
Real Time Mapping using SVG - Looks Cool!  →
Apr 15th
Episode 0.5.6 - Vim with Drew Neil, Tim Pope, and... →
thechangelog: Wynn sat down with three Vim users and experts to talk about tips and tricks for using and pimping the popular text editor. Download MP3 Items mentioned in the show: Vim seeks to provide the power of Unix’s Vi Drew Neil hosts VimCasts Tim Pope has created numerout Vim plugins Yehuda Katz from SproutCore, Rails, and jQuery fame. Dr. Nic says Vim is cutting edge 1960s...
Apr 13th
137 notes
2 tags
De-Identify your data or Fakerize your data
Ever need to pull a copy of your production data? Ever need to create a demo sandbox for your sales team? We did. So we created a gem called Fakerize, it is currently going though some internal testing, but we will launch as open source as soon as we have all the issues worked out. This Command Line Interface, makes it very easy to de-identify your database. You simply create a config...
Apr 12th