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 [...]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Training Hackers for an Awesome Job Market
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 [...]
Radiant WYSIWYG Editor Comparison
September 9, 2010 - 3:44 pm
Radiant is a popular content management system written in Rails. It is very simple and lightweight out of the box, and customizing it is fast and easy. Several of our current projects use Radiant and we’ve been searching for a more intuitive editor than Markdown or Textile - both of which come packaged with Radiant [...]
Making DSLs with Ruby
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 [...]
Blazing Cloud Sign
September 1, 2010 - 10:13 pm
We have a new sign for our office. Check it out next time you visit:
What’s weird about floats in objective-c?
August 9, 2010 - 11:56 am
Aright, what’s up with this? This code using a double works just fine: double myDouble = 2.2; NSLog(@"myDouble %f", myDouble); [self testDouble:myDouble]; - (void) testDouble:(double)myDouble { NSLog(@"testDouble %f", myDouble); } This code prints: myDouble 2.200000 testDouble 2.200000 No surprises there. But the same code using a float behaves very strangely: float myFloat = 3.3; NSLog(@"myFloat [...]
What's weird about floats in objective-c?
August 9, 2010 - 11:56 am
Aright, what’s up with this? This code using a double works just fine: double myDouble = 2.2; NSLog(@"myDouble %f", myDouble); [self testDouble:myDouble]; - (void) testDouble:(double)myDouble { NSLog(@"testDouble %f", myDouble); } This code prints: myDouble 2.200000 testDouble 2.200000 No surprises there. But the same code using a float behaves very strangely: float myFloat = 3.3; NSLog(@"myFloat [...]
Our First Chef Cookbook
June 28, 2010 - 4:37 pm
We recently deployed an Amazon EC2 instance and I was tasked with installing and configuring Red5 and Openfire on the system. As I often do, I took careful notes of what I did on a wiki, which is useful to have in case another instance needs to be brought up later. Manual installation using notes, [...]
Strategies on Improving Pair Programming
June 20, 2010 - 1:58 pm
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 [...]
Deploying a Redmine Wiki to Heroku
June 18, 2010 - 5:55 pm
One of the recommendations that came out of our recent retrospective was to create a Blazing Cloud wiki where we would store all of our project information, best practices, how to’s, etc. We wanted a wiki that was free, configurable/customizable and could be easily deployed to either Heroku or another hosting provider we are familiar [...]