Consulting on Different Platforms and Varying Requirements
I have been doing freelance consulting work for the past several years, mostly for .NET applications but over the past year I seem to be doing more Ruby on Rails applications. I enjoy the Ruby community more that the .NET community, not sure why but maybe because they seem more...
My Improved Rails Development Environment on the Mac
I use Apache and Phusion Passenger for my production Ruby on Rails applications, it has worked well and the deployment story couldn’t be any easier.
Experiencing Pragmatic Programmers on the iPhone
The recent announcement by the Pragmatic Programmers that they would have their books available in other formats besides PDF piqued my interest because I have a lot of their books in PDF today. I was particularly encouraged by the iPhone support and wanted to give it a shot.
iPhone Application – iRecorder
It always seems that when I have an idea, a to-do or something I would like to write down, I am in the car driving. Maybe this is my creative time where I am not writing software, working on an article or something else that needs my full attention. Sure,...
My Interview with Gregg Pollack on InfoQ
I had the opportunity to chat with Gregg Pollack about his recent venture into screencasting about scaling Ruby on Rails. It was an interesting interview and I hope it gives those folks not sure about Ruby on Rails, because they have heard it can?t scale, a chance to look at...
Change Databases in Rails with YamlDb
I have a few small Rails web sites I run and use SQLite3 for my database. SQLite3 is the default Rails database provider and works great, but there are times when you outgrow or anticipate a need to change databases. Perhaps a change to MySQL or PostgreSQL is in order....
Interesting and Painful First Contest Experience with 99Designs
I am not a designer and I never pretend to be. The projects I have worked on over the years has had a designer involved at some level so the pain of trying to make a user interface pleasant to look at was never a concern of mine. I have...
What Aspects of Agile Software Development are Working for Soloists?
I asked this question on Twitter and received some interesting and thoughtful responses. So, those of you who didn’t can’t the question on Twitter. If you consider yourself an Agile Development Methodology practitioner and work either alone or in a small team (1-2 people), which aspects of Agile work for...
Fear of the Start
I attended Nathaniel Talbott’s talk titled Fear of Programming at acts_as_conference 2009 in Orlando a few weeks ago. Nathaniel’s talk was about how we may have good ideas for a product or project but for some reason we rationalize why we can’t do them. I think we all have this...
My Conversation with New Relic CEO on InfoQ
My recent interview with New Relic CEO, Lewis Cirne is now up on InfoQ. I met Lewis at act_as_conference and chatted about the new release of RPM 1.2 which gives our Rails applications some great insight.