Took me long enough to write this one up :) January The Last Days of... Continue Reading »
Let’s start with a brief story: last year one of my teams built a new... Continue Reading »
January Enemy of All Mankind - Interesting and relatively light read of piracy and the... Continue Reading »
I saw a feature request from my friend and former colleague Ellen Beldner last night... Continue Reading »
January Pachinko - Epic multi-generational story of Koreans in Japan. Station Eleven - Excellent. I’m... Continue Reading »
I read far fewer books in 2020 than in past years. Pandemic stress and the... Continue Reading »
Years ago I wrote about identifying and focusing on the key metrics that make your... Continue Reading »
A little later than usual getting this up, but particularly given that everyone is staying... Continue Reading »
One of the key pieces of fatherly wisdom I’ve imparted on my children is “Never... Continue Reading »
We bought my 4 year-old Hi-ho! Cherry-O for Christmas. It is apparently a classic game... Continue Reading »
Here are the books that I finished this year (with my favorites in bold): January... Continue Reading »
I did a brief interview with Managers Club. Here’s one bit about advice I give... Continue Reading »
Here are the books that I finished this year (with my favorites in bold): February... Continue Reading »
I recently spoke at RailsConf about one of the worst bugs I’ve ever been involved... Continue Reading »
Aidan's First Flight at 9 Weeks Old I write this on the plane as we’re... Continue Reading »
Update: This problem is fixed in MacOS Catalina. MacOS now recoginizes the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard... Continue Reading »
I finished 18 books this year. I did a few things to read more. First,... Continue Reading »
Problem OSX (at least El Capitan) doesn’t recognize the Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Keyboard as a... Continue Reading »
It was quite the year. 2015 wasn’t quite as eventful as 2014—hard to top the... Continue Reading »
Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.... Continue Reading »
I very much like the new1 confirmation email design from Open Table. This design is... Continue Reading »
When faced with a new project the first choice a technology leader has to make... Continue Reading »
If you’re going to limit the characters that can be used in a password, don’t... Continue Reading »
Over the last few weeks I’ve spent a little time at night redesigning this site.... Continue Reading »
A few weeks ago I was listening to Episode 26 of the excellent podcast Debug... Continue Reading »
I have a rather well-documented distaste for comments. There are times where you want explanatory... Continue Reading »
Last week, I upgraded my personal laptop from a 2007 15” Macbook Pro to a... Continue Reading »
Calca is a hybrid Markdown editor and calculator. It’s awesome. Markdown First I should explain... Continue Reading »
Good programmers hate duplication. They’re intelligently lazy. So as a general rule they try to... Continue Reading »
Yesterday, my former colleague Dave Copeland published his second book: “The Senior Software Engineer”. Dave... Continue Reading »
At the beginning of a startup there generally isn’t a lot of ceremony regarding planning.... Continue Reading »
Photo from Rob Nguyen on Flickr The on-demand car-service company Uber has inspired much deserved... Continue Reading »
Tim Bray wrote a post on Tuesday agruing that Google Play Services means that the... Continue Reading »
You want to run an AB test. How many participants do you need in your... Continue Reading »
As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Here... Continue Reading »
reject! has some (at least to me) unexpected behavior that can easily lead to bugs.... Continue Reading »
RAM-only hibernate mode ~> pmset -g | grep hibernatemode hibernatemode 3 ~> sudo pmset -a... Continue Reading »
A question recently resurfaced on the vanity-talk mailing list about setting up tests with non-even... Continue Reading »
Last Thursday the Rails security team announced CVE-2012-2660. This bug takes advantage of an issue... Continue Reading »
A method that returns true or false is called a “predicate method”. In Ruby, there... Continue Reading »
Back in January, my very talented colleague Dave Copeland and me spent a bit of... Continue Reading »
Boxee is a fork of the excellent XBMC media player that runs on Macs, AppleTVs... Continue Reading »
- Quarterbacks by Ableman / Teacher by Editor B Most Likely to Succeed, the most... Continue Reading »
I’ve recently started receiving a ton of CGI::Session::CookieStore::TamperedWithCookie errors on an application I manage. All... Continue Reading »
I’ve recently read some excellent long form magazine articles. Michael Lewis The End Michael Lewis... Continue Reading »
A new Web Designer I work with was running into an error when attempting to... Continue Reading »
- flickr user sanjaysuchak Anyone who knows me knows that I am very happy with... Continue Reading »
Taking a break from work to participate in a silly blog meme. Take a picture... Continue Reading »
One of our applications is still running Rails 2.0. I’m planning to upgrade to 2.1... Continue Reading »
I’ve had to switch the phone on my Verizon account a few times in the... Continue Reading »
I think that the release last year of the iPhone represented the biggest jump in... Continue Reading »
Baggu sells reusable shopping bags. Their shop has a simple interface that makes it really... Continue Reading »
I attended the Web Content Mavens Meeting tonight. Phil Kemelor gave a presentation on “Tuning... Continue Reading »
In September I left Lockheed Martin to start a company with my very talented colleague... Continue Reading »
Interesting interview with graphic designer Michael Bierut about the overall excellence and startling consistency of... Continue Reading »
Ian and I are currently working on adding support for Authorize.Net CIM to ActiveMerchant. Things... Continue Reading »
I have Azureus set up with the RSSFeed Scanner plugin to check a few Mininova... Continue Reading »
Last week, I went to the doctor for a checkup for the first time since... Continue Reading »
Last week Ian and I were running into a problem with alias_method. It turned out... Continue Reading »
I was catching up on some reading today and came across two sad commentaries on... Continue Reading »
AjaxBestiary, a site about rich internet application development, recently interviewed my business partner Ian Lotinsky.... Continue Reading »
My first patch was committed to the Rails trunk yesterday. I’m pretty excited. The community... Continue Reading »
I will be presenting at the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group meeting on Wednesday, November... Continue Reading »
I am a big fan of the Google Notifier. Unfortunately it is limited to one... Continue Reading »
I will be speaking about the Liquid templating language at the November meeting of the... Continue Reading »
I went to the NovaRUG meeting tonight. Here is a recap. Microformats Ray Daly gave... Continue Reading »
I took EasilyInvited down at the beginning of September because I didn’t want to pay... Continue Reading »
The application I’m on uses cookies tied to a particular subdomain. The hostnames we were... Continue Reading »
[Why We Compete](http://blog.washingtonpost.com/why-we-compete/2007/10/community.html) Really interesting article with a lot of nuance. Some of the comments... Continue Reading »
Finished in 4.252455 seconds. 119 tests, 263 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors Finished in 6.626427... Continue Reading »
Me and Ian attended RubyEast today. It was a good conference, obviously much smaller than... Continue Reading »
I’m not surprised that the few posts here that google ranks relatively high (mostly my... Continue Reading »
<code> ArgumentError: Admin is not missing constant UsersController! method load_missing_constant in dependencies.rb at line 240... Continue Reading »
I can’t remember where I read it, but I remember someone once saying that doing... Continue Reading »
At my house we have an XBox set up to run XBox Media Center hooked... Continue Reading »
A lot of times I read something that I think is cool and I want... Continue Reading »
I’ve been working on an application that sends emails. (You’ll hear more about the application... Continue Reading »
I’ve been working on an application for a while. There are a bunch more things... Continue Reading »
**Simple play is also the most beautiful**. How often do you see a pass of... Continue Reading »
I went to the NOVA RUG meeting tonight. It was my first NOVA RUG meeting... Continue Reading »
The most important thing that you can do for the security of your web application... Continue Reading »
Properly encoding user input is one of the most important security precautions that you can... Continue Reading »
Back in December I made a small loan to a woman in Mexico via Kiva,... Continue Reading »
Up until today I had been unable to comment on my blog. For a while... Continue Reading »
(photo by aeioux) I’ve been trying to get more into the graphic design aspect of... Continue Reading »
Two weeks ago I gave a presentation to my department at work about Modern Web... Continue Reading »
The Rails Way Goal is to describe the code style of rails through some examples.... Continue Reading »
Britt Selvitelle Alex Payne Preconceived notions about twitter, because a month ago, the “5 questions”... Continue Reading »
Amy Hoy Designers working with developers. We’re all nerds, but different types of nerds. We... Continue Reading »
I wanted to go to RejectConf or the Pivotal party at Rock Bottom, but I’m... Continue Reading »
Dan Moniz The speaker is a no show. Aint that about a bitch. Impromptu Open... Continue Reading »
Starts out by thanking Matz. Would like to see Rails set the standard for integration... Continue Reading »
Chad Fowler intro: talking to Ze about the conference he was expecting goofy, but talking... Continue Reading »
Xen and the Art of Rails Deployment Ezra Zygmuntowicz - EngineYard.com Founder of Engine Yard.... Continue Reading »
Question to start: who are all you people? A lot of the crowd works for... Continue Reading »
Steven Smith of FiveRuns Is Rails ready for the Enterprise? Is the Enterprise ready for... Continue Reading »
Nick Merwin The talk is about getting an understanding of what is going on under... Continue Reading »
Brian Leanord How’s Neteans Like Rails Free Open Source Plug-in Architecture Large community Download latest... Continue Reading »
What a day. I’m glad I am taking notes, because this morning’s sessions fell like... Continue Reading »
David Verba, Adaptive Path - Came there to work on measuremap the rails app that... Continue Reading »
MasterView Template Plugin/Gem We need to work better with designers. Can work with html files... Continue Reading »
Devon Jones, Architect of Web Systems, Vonage Stephen Becker, Developer, Vonage They’re going to talk... Continue Reading »
I need to learn Smalltalk. Avi seems to be one of the smarter people I’ve... Continue Reading »
Well, the first day of the week I’ve been waiting for all year is over.... Continue Reading »
Dirk Elmendorf, Cofounder of Rackspace This presentation was a bit basic but I think that... Continue Reading »
Scott Raymond, works on BlinkSale Had to stand for the first half of the talk... Continue Reading »
Alex Chafee and Brian Takita, Pivotal Labs slides They’ve done 15 ruby on rails app... Continue Reading »
Just got back from the a birds of a feather session about “DTrace” and the... Continue Reading »
Starting with a story about textmate. He liked the mac, but hated all the editors,... Continue Reading »
Chad Fowler’s intro: wants to set the focus of the community. Specifically he wants to... Continue Reading »
Streaming notes: Why they are doing it? expand java, expand ruby's reach. no better way... Continue Reading »
They're working on a stripped down version of GlassFish that gives the benefits of an... Continue Reading »
First off, I can not overstate how overwhelmingly popular the mac is. There are probably... Continue Reading »
Jamis just made a joke about the sea of macs. I guess I’m not the... Continue Reading »
During my flight from BWI to Portland (via Vegas and San Jose) I read Eric... Continue Reading »
I hate packing, so instead I'm procrastinating by writing this post. Tomorrow I will spend... Continue Reading »
- Mid Manhattan (Current Map on the left, KickMap on the right) I came across... Continue Reading »
Last week I was trying to log into an application and I noticed a few... Continue Reading »
Service outages happen. I understand that. But as the saying goes you should judge talent... Continue Reading »
I finally finished setting up my LinkedIn profile this morning. I haven't seen that many... Continue Reading »
- Double click any word to get a definition Josh Evnin just wrote a nice... Continue Reading »
May 17-20 I'll be in Portland, Oregon for RailsConf 2007. And I could not be... Continue Reading »
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Military saying Last night I started reading Made... Continue Reading »
I recently read Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier and I absolutely cannot recommend it more... Continue Reading »
I know it is getting clichéd to talk about how the world is getting smaller,... Continue Reading »
As I've written before I am a huge fan of collaborative filtering, and think that... Continue Reading »
Earlier this week my VPN software began giving me "Connection Failed: Remote Host Not Responding"... Continue Reading »
During my beautiful 1 1/2 weeks off from work I finally got around to playing... Continue Reading »
kottke published his best links of 2006 today I must confess that I'm not a... Continue Reading »
Seems that a team at the University of Washington have implemented a selfish bittorrent client,... Continue Reading »
Happy New Year to all! I'm not big on New Year's Resolutions (although they may... Continue Reading »
Microfinance is the practice of lending small amounts, generally on the order of several hundred... Continue Reading »
"The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if... Continue Reading »
Great article in the New York Times on the absurdity of airport security yesterday. I've... Continue Reading »
While unpacking from my recent office move I came across an old copy of an... Continue Reading »
I recently read Rebecca J. Wirfs-Brock's excellent article, “Toward Exception Handling Best Practices and Patterns”... Continue Reading »
This is the obligatory hello world post. I've found that the process of writing often... Continue Reading »