I went to (and spoke at) my first Ruby conference this past weekend. Lone Star Ruby Conference was held in Austin and consisted of 1 training day & 2 days of conference sessions. There were 2 tracks, and even still I was often conflicted on which session to attend. The hallway conversations were...
Load Testing our Heroku app
Friday, August 06 2010
I've said many times before how much I love Heroku. Though they've had an unusually large amount of downtime this week (~1 hour), I'm still loving their service. One of the applications that we're building is expecting a large wave of traffic shortly following a blitz PR campaign. The golden question...
Using CarrierWave with Mongoid
Sunday, July 18 2010
I'm moving a side project over to Rails 3, and I purposely chose a set of technologies that I hadn't used yet. Rails 3 Mongoid (hosted on MongoHQ) Haml CarrierWave (for file uploads) I'll post about the general experience of this project later, but suffice it to say I'm liking this stack a lot. But this...
GiggleTouch Featured in the App Store
Saturday, July 17 2010
I never got around to blogging this, but a few weeks ago I created my first iPad app (it's a universal binary, so it works on iPhone as well). It's called GiggleTouch and it's $0.99, available on the Apple App Store. So, what is it? GiggleTouch is simply an app for young children. My 1-year-old twins...
Dealing with Dates & Time Zones in Objective-C
Monday, June 21 2010
Date formatting is always one of those areas (especially in a newer language) where you continually need to look it up to do it the right way. In an application that I'm building I have a need to deal with dates coming from an XML feed, so I need to parse them as a string. I also need to be able to display...
Sorry Safari 5
Wednesday, June 16 2010
I love browser innovation. I like seeing new features and I'm always eager to switch to the faster, better, more comfortable browser. After hearing good things on Twitter, I was actually ready to put all my eggs in the Safari basket. That is, until I tried using it for a week. First, the good things...
ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action has Arrived
Wednesday, June 16 2010
You can order it from Manning or Amazon affiliate link . My thoughts on this edition: In this edition we took a different approach. The first edition, while it reviewed well, had a barrier of entry. It was purposely for the intermediate to advanced developer. We wanted to make this 2nd edition approachable...
Installing PostgreSQL for Rails on Mac OS X
Thursday, June 10 2010
If you're doing any serious Rails work with Heroku you'll eventually want to run the same database server they are, namely PostgreSQL. One such reason is if you plan on using Geokit , all of the geo math is done at the database level and thus not available on Sqlite. There are numerous ways of installing...
Give Your Eyes a Break with Safari 5 Reader
Wednesday, June 09 2010
Since Safari 5 was released I decided to set it as the default browser for a week and see how I liked it. Previously my default was Firefox, but mainly because the developer tools are so kick ass with it. Chrome is nice and fast (and I use it still), but doesn't feel like a Mac app and I was seriously...
Speaking at iPhone Dev Con in San Diego
Tuesday, June 08 2010
I'll be heading to San Diego in September at iPhone/iPad Dev Con 2010 . I'll be giving two talks: iPhone SQLite Techniques iPhone Dev for .NET Developers This is a great chance to get some top notch training for iPhone & iPad development. The conference is from September 27th - 29th. If you register...
