Thoughts on software engineering, architecture, technical leadership, and more
After several years, two children, and a marriage(!). I’ve taken to picking up writing on my blog again. In the past I rolled my own blogging application, based on rails, and using dropbox for storage, called Cloudpress crucially though, all the historic posts were in markdown. Making porting them to...
We love going on road trips, however the kids in the back don’t always feel the same way. Traveling anywhere over a couple of hours becomes tricky as there’s only so much colouring they want to do! They, like all of us, are used to watching things on demand.
At Soho House we’re currently running several Rails apps, with single sign on authentication powered by OAuth2, and a drop in piece of rack middleware called bouncer that standardizes our session management across all of our newer applications. Additionally we’re also moving a lot of those apps into Docker containers...
It’s 5:30PM, the phone rings with a last minute request to repoint a domain somwhere. “Uhh, sorry, that’s going to take at least 24hrs from the minute I change the record, but the domains team have already gone home for the day, and I don’t have access”.
Almost eighteen months ago I had the idea to use dropbox to back all of my publishing, making it easy to write posts from any device, all over the world, without having to log in. Using the offline sync capability of dropbox to power it all. I ended up writing...
Rails has always had a neglected sibling through it’s entire life, while everything else has been blessed with changes and upgrades. The view layer is still relatively unchanged since rails first release in 2004. There have been numerous attempts to try to update the view layer to de-couple the rendering...
Well over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a little gem that makes it easy to get notifications when the Tube status changes. As a byproduct it also gives easy access to the tube data as ruby objects too :)
I’m looking at you Microsoft web services!
After a lot of trawling around the internet I couldn’t find any reference as to how to set up a post deploy hook for heroku. Even the airbrake:heroku:add_post_deploy_hook rake task didn’t seem to work, so I have managed to piece together my own custom post deploy hook
I’m currently working on a social networking platform(very beta!) for London, and we use Resque to handle all of our background jobs, sending outbound mail, image processing etc.
Time, we can all agree, is an incredibly useful concept, unfortunately the recent decision to drop <time> from the HTML5 spec is not useful.
I’m currently working on a social media platform for London, with it’s main purpose being to promote a wellbeing lifestyle in a hectic city. I wrote this handy little utility module for creating methods from serialized data.
If you, like me, have tried to use helpers to generate complex chunks of HTML programmaticly, then you will have noticed that content_tag doesn’t really cut it for large chunks of HTML
I have recently upgraded my slicehost box to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and upgraded the Passenger version to 3, the difference in performance is incredible, at least a 20% decrease in response times.
I was working on a project a while ago with user comments, and wanted each person to have their own avatar, however, the Gravatar plugins that existed for Rails were overkill for my needs.