Blazing Cloud creates innovative mobile products to clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. At the core of our success is a continuous appetite for becoming experts at new techniques and technologies, paired with our willingness to pay it forward. Over the past year, our classes and events were the main outlet for sharing [...]
Author Archives: sarah
looking for great developers (mobile & web)
April 3, 2012 – 3:42 pm
Blazing Cloud isn’t your typical startup or consulting agency. We’re a bunch of startup people who work together to deliver products for hire, creating a structure to give us freedom to pursue our own entrepreneurial ideas or other life plans. I’ve been intentionally slow to grow the company over the past year, as we settled [...]
Pivotal Labs acquired by EMC
March 27, 2012 – 9:01 am
Last week EMC acquired Pivotal Labs. Pivotal Labs anticipates accelerated growth, which, along with the EMC relationship, will position them well for going after even bigger enterprise customers. While they still plan to work with startups, an interview with Pivotal’s Eduard Hiatt highlights the opportunity presented by the acquisition to “spread our message faster.” The [...]
Getting Started with Jasmine and Rails 3.2
March 3, 2012 – 9:55 am
tldr; check out the git repo Some good folks have been putting together gems that really help getting started with Javascript testing in Rails, which became somewhat more challenging with the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. I decided to dig through some of this and get up to speed with a fresh install of Rails 3.2.2 [...]
Lauren Ipsum: CS Fiction for Kids
October 10, 2011 – 7:14 am
We just backed the Lauren Ipsum project on KickStarter. This children’s story is an adventure through computer science concepts. The main character, Lauren Ipsum, meets a Wandering Salesman in the first chapter who is finding his way home using the algorithm of that name. It’ll be interesting to read the rest of the book and [...]
Mobile Lean UX
August 14, 2011 – 11:56 am
Agile development is an ideal way to create production software, but how do we apply agile methodologies to the design of the user experience? User experience design benefits from a holistic approach and if we aren’t careful, doing iterative development can result in a disjointed and confusing user experience or expensive re-designs. I gave a [...]
Rack for Easy HTTP redirect
August 4, 2011 – 11:05 am
We recently moved our class sign-up to EventBrite. It used to be hosted on heroku with the subdomain classes.blazingcloud.net. However, when we changed our DNS to direct to eventbrite, it didn’t end up targetting our eventbrite subdomain: blazingcloud.eventbrite.com — hitting the EventBrite homepage instead. Rack to the rescue! We set up another Heroku app with [...]
remarkable validations for rails 3
July 21, 2011 – 10:26 am
I’ve been working on upgrading an app from Rails 2.3.11 to Rails 3.1. It was using the old rspec-on-rails-matchers plugin to get validators like: it ‘verifies that login is between 3 and 40 characters’ do User.new.should validate_length_of(:login, :within => 3..40) end I like that validation syntax, but lately when I see a plugins, I worry [...]
Brad Smith, Intuit: entrepreneurship in a large company
May 27, 2011 – 10:13 pm
A conversation with Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Eric Ries: The Relevance of Entrepreneurship at Intuit. Brad had a number of really awesome lines, which unfortunately came off as a bit too rehearsed, so much so, that it made me wonder if there are many Intuit engineer that have a real opportunity to innovate as [...]
Eric Ries: Stop Wasting People’s Time
May 23, 2011 – 12:13 pm
At SLLConf this year, we decided to try an experiment of live blogging via typewith.me. The event is being simulcast to a global audience, just like last year. This is the first of a series. Eric Ries kicked it off with an update on the Lean Startup “movement.” Eric Ries says he’s just a figurehead, [...]