I’ve seen various posts that describe what it means to be “on rails” but none that actually address actual physics of it, and why it’s such a perfect metaphor for what Ruby on Rails is. Why do trains stay on their tracks? Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not the flanges. If it were the flanges, [...]
Couch to 5k is a 9 week running schedule to take you from being a couch potato to being able to run a 5k. I finished it yesterday, with 3 runs this week, a total of 11.5 miles, at about a 9min/mile pace. I wanted to put some notes about the experience out there, for [...]
Whenever I start a new web application, it seems that there’s a fair amount of reinventing the wheel in terms of navigation and UI structure. There are tons of tools to help with the individual widgets on the page, including JQueryUI, ExtJS, Dojo, to name a few. They all offer buttons, dialogs, accordions, tabs, etc, [...]
Often, an app’s models need a lifecycle, transitioning between different states according to different business rules. The leading contender for abstracting this is the state_machine gem for Rails. (There are other options too, but not as rich.) It allows you to create a finite state machine on top of ActiveRecord, including all the goodness of events, [...]
I’ve been trying to pin down some thoughts around the frustration, drama, and friction that seems to arise on workplace projects, and I think almost all of it comes down to the character of the people in the project. We’re often tempted to pin it on impersonal attributes of the project’s context, but it really [...]
I am motivated by efficiently building quality solutions in a positive team environment. 13 words to sum it all up. If all that happens, it’s like a perpetual motion machine of success. There are several required elements of a tactical environment to make that happen: Work from home. Without commute times, you don’t have to [...]
This week, I’m a happy geek: I was able to persuade my boss to buy me a Mac as my new workstation. And although Apple freshened the notebook line in interval between the order being placed and it actually arriving at my house, I’m very happy with the 17″ MacBook Pro as-is. But the point [...]
An early comment in this blog by my dad took issue with my subtitle, “Applying and using technology when you lack the desire or resources to be an Alpha Geek.” Specifically, I can’t really blame a lack of resources on my non-alpha geek status. Yes, I suppose if I wanted, I could certainly get to [...]
I reached a milestone today with my GTD project: it became usable enough that I can use it to track what I’m working on for its development. In programmer’s parlance, that’s eating my own dogfood. Granted, the food tastes pretty bland and requires extra chewing, but it’s edible. A lot of personal projects are born [...]
According to Larry Wall, the first virtue of a programmer is laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it I [...]