September 18, 2010 - 7:39 am
Blazing Cloud is working on a new iPhone application, called Peer Pressure. The idea is that you get your friends to help you achieve your goals. We’re beta testing it and it is at the point where I feel ready to try a public goal. I’ve have been working on updating my class curriculum for [...]
September 17, 2010 - 10:20 am
Evan Phoenix (@evanphx), lead developer for Rubinius, spoke today at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference about how to effectively run or contribute to an open source project. Awesome talk. Great information that is pretty slow to figure out by osmosis. Evan presented 4 guidelines: Contributors are a privilege: sometimes they feel like a burden. They [...]
September 11, 2010 - 12:56 am
I hear that the economy still sucks and lots of people are out of work, and I believe it. At the same time, I hear managers complain that they can’t find good engineers who know the tools and languages to create mobile and web software. Nick Saint published an insightful article today, “Why It’s So [...]
September 5, 2010 - 10:34 pm
My favorite Ruby Kaigi talk was by Yasuko Ohba (@nay3) of Everyleaf Corporation in Japan. Despite the fact that the talk was in Japanese, with nice code examples on the slides and key translations over IRC, I was able to follow the presentation and learn some tricks. The coding techniques are really quite straight-forward, just [...]
September 1, 2010 - 10:13 pm
We have a new sign for our office. Check it out next time you visit:
For last week’s retrospective, we decided to focus on strategies to improve our performance as pair programmers. We chose the “Force Field Analysis” activity from the Agile Retrospectives book, an activity geared toward gaining insight. I was pleased to hear at the end of the retrospective, one of the newer engineers remark: “In my fifteen [...]
I was excited to participate in the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit last Friday. Elesterama has a nice write-up of the keynote, which was followed by an unconference led by the fabulous Kaliha Hamlin. The unconference format puts the hallway track front and center, allowing for lots of interaction and great conversations. The hot topics of the [...]
Yesterday we were deep in the middle of coding using RSpec 2 and Rails 3 and needed to verify that a method made a specific http request. I happily discovered WebMock, which appears to be a next generation FakeWeb. Originally developed by Bartosz Blimke, I was happy to see that Sam Phillips had it working [...]
Blazing Cloud is seeking companies to join the next session of its innovative internship program. The program targets companies which are developing with Ruby on Rails and related tech. Arguably, this shouldn’t even be called an internship — it is really an on ramp for talented engineers hungry to break into Rails development. The company [...]
Suppose we wanted to modify a basic Rails application so there was the option of a preview before creating a new record. What is a good pattern for adding a second button to a form? There are two options: One controller action with a flag: nice articles by EyeDeal and Myers Development (from 2008 and [...]
