The second part of our Startup Lessons Learned series covers the interesting story of Heroku’s “Epic Pivot” told by Andy Wiggins. photo credit: Morgan Linton 6 weeks to build initial prototype Idea: Filemaker Pro for the web (but with real programming tools) Accepted to Y-Combinator Soft-Launched with Ruby Inside community Closed $3M VC round in [...]
We’ve keeping an eye out for hosted continuous integration for some time. Recently, I heard about CloudBees from John Dunham at Sauce Labs (another great cloud-hosted service which will run your Selenium tests). It seems some ofthe Hudson folk have escaped from Oracle, renamed/forked the open source project as “Jenkins” and are setting up shop [...]
On March 23rd, Blazing Cloud and Engine Yard hosted 25 Ruby enthusiasts for a Capybara and RSpec Multi-Browser testing workshop. This 2-hour session walked students through building a new Rails 3 app using RSpec and Capybara paired with Selenium for automated browser testing. A custom IDE developed by Engine Yard was used to minimize setup [...]
March 17, 2011 – 12:25 pm
1) Sign into AWS account 2) Get your Account Security key, and secret key 3) add to bundle : gem ‘aws-ses’, :require => ‘aws/ses’ 4) you are going to need to know that you are sandboxed – this means you can only send to – and send from emails that you verify. here is a [...]
In Device the easiest way to support an admin role is to simply add an attribute that can be used to identify administrators, which doesn’t involve any migration. So after following Lorien’s post, I set @admin_user to a Device user model and made sure it had all the required Typus attributes. Below are the steps [...]
February 18, 2011 – 5:03 pm
We really like Typus at Blazing Cloud, and we end up using it in most of our Ruby on Rails projects. It provides good enough UI for a lot of our data entry needs, and is very quick to set-up. We also use Devise for authentication, and frequently end up with both in the same [...]
January 30, 2011 – 8:09 am
We’ve decided to offer our popular Ruby on Rails class to remote participants. I’ll be giving a repeat of the first class today (Sunday, Jan 30th) at 4pm PST and classes will be recorded. The class lasts for 2 hours. The regular class time will be Tuesdays 6:30-8:30pm PST and there will be 8 class [...]
December 12, 2010 – 9:44 am
Join Blazing Cloud for a weekend workshop on January 22-23rd and learn to build a website that can easily be edited by non-technical people. These days it’s not enough to create a website for someone — we need to provide them tools where they can update text and images, keeping their web presence aligned with [...]
December 2, 2010 – 11:41 am
On several occasions I’ve had Heroku apps fail to recognize columns I add to the database. The symptoms of this problem are: The app throws an error if you visit a page with the new methods referencing the column names If you use heroku console and create your new object it won’t have the attributes [...]
November 21, 2010 – 12:40 am
In Rails we have two different ways of Caching – Page Caching: which is always stored on Disk – Action & Fragment Caching: which uses the configure cache configured in our Rails instance. By default Rails provides three techniques: 1) Page Caching Allows the request for a generated page to be fulfilled by the webserver, without [...]
