January 2012
1 post
5 tags
Believing in Tim Tebow →
He might not have gotten it done in yesterdays playoff game, but it appears that Tim Tebow really is one of the good guys.
This whole thing makes no football sense, of course. Most NFL players hardly talk to teammates before a game, much less visit with the sick and dying.
Isn’t that a huge distraction?
”Just the opposite,” Tebow says. “It’s by far the best thing...
November 2011
1 post
1 tag
The vim learning curve is a myth →
No one ever says “I’d love to learn Street Fighter 2, but there are just so many combos!” People don’t say this because learning a game is enjoyable. You start off with just the basic kicks and punches, and those get you by. Later, you learn more advanced moves, maybe even by accident.
Learning vim is like this.
Great article by the guys at thoughtbot about learning vim.
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
Van Halen and contractual integrity →
Fantastically interesting article about the rather strange contractual stipulation that the rock group Van Halen put in the contracts for their gigs back during their big tours in the 80s. With exceedingly complex stage setups, the group wanted to be sure that their extensive contracts were being followed to the letter, so that the shows would go ahead without any technical glitches. What better...
June 2011
7 posts
5 tags
Designing GitHub for Mac →
A really interesting look at how the design for GitHub for Mac came together.
3 tags
“Being a racing driver means you are racing with other people, and if you no...”
– Ayrton Senna
“To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier....”
– Derek Sivers, Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
“In many ways, the 11.6-inch Air is technically more impressive than the iPad....”
– Forkbombr — Size Doesn’t Matter: My Review of the 11.6-inch MacBook Air
3 tags
Refresh
If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you won’t notice much difference, but if you’re reading this at ejdraper.com, then you’ll spot that I’ve changed the theme on this blog, to the awesome cardstock theme by Parker Ehret. As the transition from my sole trader ejdraper.com business to KickCode Ltd has now been complete for a few months, I think it makes sense to...
January 2011
1 post
4 tags
Geckoboard & Rails 3
As it might be obvious from my previous post, I dig Geckoboard a great deal. It’s a fantastic, useful tool for visualising data at-a-glance. My immediate thought when I got my invite and started to play with it was of course, “what other stats can I hook up to this awesome app?”.
Once I’d gotten Watchy integrated with Geckoboard, and exposed a wide variety of cool, useful...
December 2010
1 post
6 tags
Geckoboard & Watchy
As I previously mentioned, I recently launched a web app called Watchy with Kat Neville. Also, I’ve recently received a beta invite to test out Geckoboard, a fantastic dashboard application that lets you add widgets displaying data from various sources, to construct a dashboard full of useful information. Seeing as how some of the most useful information that I want to see throughout my day...
October 2010
1 post
5 tags
11 tips: Build a web app in one month →
11 tips for building a web app in one month, written by Kat, my partner on our new web app, Watchy. It’s got some great detail on our experiences building and launching the first version of Watchy in just a month.
September 2010
1 post
3 tags
Announcing: KickCode
Bit behind on this one, and anyone who follows me on Twitter will have already seen this - but last week, on September 1st 2010, KickCode Ltd launched. This is my new development company, offering web and mobile development, and specialising in Ruby on Rails and Android development. It’s a culmination of almost 18 months hard work freelancing doing web development, and I’m now taking...
August 2010
1 post
6 tags
Running Free
This was an article I wrote a few months ago, but for some reason forgot to tidy up and actually publish. I’m doing so now as after re-reading it, I still think it’s right, and if anything it’s even more pertinent now given Apple’s “antennagate” issues with the iPhone 4, and the news that Android phones are now outselling the iPhone.
I already dropped a link...
May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Discipline
I’ve just finished reading Cesar’s Way, a book written by The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan. It’s a fantastic read if you have a dog, and has really helped me better understand our gorgeous pet Dalmatian Rocky. Some of the insights though are more profound than just how they relate to our canine friends. In particular, Cesar’s take on discipline I found to be very...
Tab Cleanup
Haven’t posted in a while, been crazy busy with lots and lots of cool stuff. Figured it might be a start though just to post some recent great stuff I’ve been looking at and reading.
My Common Git Workflow - good article from Yehuda Katz about a basic Git workflow for common operations, specifically compared to the equivalent Subversion commands.
Smash Into Vim - PeepCode episode on...
January 2010
4 posts
6 tags
autotest
I’ve just recently started using autotest again, and it’s making development so much easier, and more enjoyable. If you do any TDD (test driven development) with Ruby, you need autotest running, as it really improves the experience massively.
With autotest, and growl, you can plod away writing failing tests, implementing code so that they pass, and then rinse and repeat - all the way...
4 tags
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Not a great start to my yearly goals - right after posting about how I want to blog every other day, I manage to go six days without a post! Time to try again, starting from today…
I was planning my next article as a follow-up to the Getting started with Rails 2.3.5 article I did in December, when I stumbled across this rather brilliant work in progress online tutorial book, Ruby on Rails...
5 tags
Looking Forward
Following up on my 2009 retrospective post, I think I’ll follow the trend and jot down a few goals and thoughts for 2010.
This coming year I want to continue to get even more productive and organised. Managing a lot of different projects presents unique challenges, and I worked hard this last year to settle on a good workflow, but I think I can probably get more organised still in terms of...
4 tags
Looking Back
I’ve been relaxing over the holidays so have only just found time to write a 2009 year end post, but thought I should definitely do it as 2009 has been very exciting!
2009 was the year that I went freelance, and started my own business, mainly focusing on Ruby on Rails work. For the most part there has been plenty of work to keep me busy, and even though it was way back in March that I quit...
December 2009
8 posts
5 tags
Announcing Appsta 1.1.0
Worked a bit on tidying Appsta up this evening, and made a few decisions that will hopefully make it a bit more useful, and also hopefully get a few more people interested in using and contributing to it!
Appsta is at its core a library of helper methods for use in Rails templates, to help you build useful Rails app creation scripts that can cut down the amount of time it takes for you to get a...
4 tags
Getting started with Rails 2.3.5
This is a tutorial guided towards those who are new to Rails, or those who have not used it since v1.x and who might want a newbie-style refresher. I’ll be working my way through to some more advanced and interesting topics soon, so for those of you who know all of this already, please stay tuned!
I’ve now been using Ruby on Rails for almost four years, and have seen it progress from...
5 tags
Delicious irony, and MongoDB
So I guess it would stand to reason that a day after blogging about how awesome my new blog routine is, and how it helps me to post every day now, I get busy enough not to find time to really polish the draft I have going at the minute. Not wanting to lose my streak (just), I figured I’d at least try to post something useful today, even if it’s just a link to someone else.
This...
1 tag
Blogging, and sticking to it
As some of you may have noticed - I’ve been blogging a lot more in the last few days. This is me attempting to start a New Years resolution early, and that’s to try and publish a new post everyday.
However, I always found writing a new post from scratch, checking it twice, proof reading it and publishing it all in one day very daunting. Two different things have helped me with this.
...
4 tags
The paradoxical web application hypothesis
It suddenly dawned on me that something interesting, and in some ways very paradoxical, is occurring with current application trends. Over the last few years, there has been a marked movement towards rich user experiences in web applications - more and more web apps are using Flash and/or AJAX as well as other modern concepts to really make web sites behave and feel truly like first class...
4 tags
Understanding Management
I recently embarked on an openings course with the Open University, with a view to it being the first step for me on the way to a distance learning business degree. The openings course is mainly designed to get you into a studying frame of mind, and is perfect for someone like me who is returning to studying after six years. However, as the choices for the two openings courses on the way to a...
4 tags
Agile and Scrum'd
I’ve been meaning to write this up for almost two weeks now, but there is no time like the present! A couple of weeks ago Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions took some time out of his busy schedule to speak to me about agile, and specifically agile from a freelancers point of view.
We had a great chat and covered a number of different things, but it was very cool...
6 tags
Advanced Tumblr Customization
As I hinted in my last post, I wanted to outline a few tips and tricks I used to customize this site pretty heavily when getting it up and running on Tumblr.
The documentation for building custom themes is pretty comprehensive, and covers the majority of things you’d want to do when building a customized site. I won’t rehash it here, needless to say it’s a relatively...
November 2009
2 posts
4 tags
Running a site on Tumblr
Following on from my last post, I figured I’d go into a bit more depth about the details of running a site on Tumblr, especially a customized one. You can do some pretty cool things with Tumblr, and especially with custom themes, but for now I’ll be focusing on some of the higher level considerations and settings, and I’ll do a separate post that will go into my experiences of...
New site design
As the observant amongst you will have noticed, I’ve now updated this site with a brand new design. The really observant will have also noticed that it’s now hosted on Tumblr.
I really like the Tumblr platform, and I think it’s got some great tools for publishing content. The contributions and interest in the Feather blog app that me and Mike started 18 months ago seems to have...
September 2009
1 post
Unboxing the HTC Hero, and a mini review
This week I took delivery of my new phone, the HTC Hero. After getting bored and frustrated with the iPhone, both from a user perspective, and very much so from a developer perspective, I looked into the Android platform in greater detail. After playing around with the emulator and writing some code, I was sold. The HTC Hero is one of the newer Android devices on the market, and seemed to do...
July 2009
1 post
Announcing Appsta
I’ve just released a new gem called Appsta. Put simply, Appsta makes bootstrapping Rails applications much easier. But really it just builds upon an awesome new feature in Rails 2.3, templates. Templates are like build scripts for new applications - after the skeleton of the application is created, you can use a template to customize it to how you like it, removing unnecessary files, adding in...
May 2009
1 post
RailsConf 2009
Better late than never eh? Three weeks after the end of RailsConf, I thought I’d write a wrap-up post. Me and my wife turned the trip over to Vegas into a much needed holiday - we were out there four days before the conference began, and had a few more days left in Vegas after it ended too. Overall we had a great time, although I can’t say that it was a particularly relaxing break -...
April 2009
1 post
Freebird
I meant to write this article four weeks ago, as I had just finished in my full time position with Touch Local, and was about to start working freelance full-time. Since then, my freelance work has kept me plenty busy, and I never got chance to write this post. So today I figured I’d take some time out to write it, with the added bonus that I now have a month worth of working for myself to...
February 2009
1 post
Foot Locker Unlocked
So me and my buddy Mike have recently put together and launched a new site, Foot Locker Unlocked. This was a rewrite and redesign of an existing version of the site in Ruby on Rails. It’s main focus is the sneaker gallery, where you can read about all sorts of different sneakers, as well as see some great images of them, and rate them. It has a fair few social features, with more to follow....
January 2009
4 posts
6 tags
Setup Feather to run as a slice within a Merb app
In response to a few queries and comments on my post about the ejdraper.com blog running as a Feather slice underneath a parent Merb application, I decided to put together a sample app demonstrating just how you’d configure such a beast.
Introducing Feather Sample Slice Host… this is an up-to-date Merb application (Merb 1.0.8.1) that hosts Feather as a slice. It comes with a few...
3 tags
ReCover
I’ve just pushed out the second version of Cover-Up, and so it should be available via gem within a few hours.
Version 0.2 includes the following:
fixed a couple of bugs
added the option to provide your own logger to the code coverage run (see README)
few improvements to try and speed the code coverage execution up a bit
The speed improvements will be fairly useful as the initial...
6 tags
Cover-Up
I started writing a new tool on Monday, a flexible, dynamic code coverage gem written in Ruby, for Ruby code. rcov is useful, but I needed the ability to easily wrap any Ruby code in coverage, dynamically at runtime, and I wanted more flexibility in the results that come back. There are probably ways to achieve both of these with rcov given the right options, but I wanted something that offered...
4 tags
Reboot
I’ve designed and built a brand new personal site here at ejdraper.com, and have moved over this blog - all url’s from crazycool.co.uk now point to ejdraper.com/blog, and the blog integrates with the rest of my personal site, which also includes a bit about me, my portfolio of work, my code and a lifestream on the homepage aggregating content from this blog, GitHub, Flickr, Delicious...
October 2008
3 posts
4 tags
Can you hear me now?
So this blog has been a little bit up and down recently, partly because the Feather installation is overdue an update, and partly because the server could do with being rebuilt, but I figured that rather than me finding out the site has been down for a day and then manually booting it, there must be an automated way of picking up these issues and restarting the site. Sure enough, there is!
God...
5 tags
Rename
So I’ve decided to rename my GitHub account, from http://github.com/eldiablo to http://github.com/edraper. If you’re using or working against feather-plugins or merb-manage then you’ll need to reset your remote location for doing a git pull or whatever. Not sure if you’ve forked whether that’ll continue to work, probably best to check and rebase against the repo at the new url. Any questions let...
3 tags
Ready to Rumble
Wow, so what a 48 hours it was doing the Rails Rumble! Really great to get something up and running in two days. Me and my boy Mike really got it hooked up and came up with something pretty cool we think.
Likis is a language wiki designed to encourage collaboration and contribution to build an extensive language resource, to help people learn languages. It allows wiki-style editing of language...
July 2008
4 posts
7 tags
Advent 4211 Netbook
Yesterday I picked up an Advent 4211 netbook. It’s exactly the same hardware as the MSI Wind, only it’s a re-branded, cheaper version. It’s a really cool piece of kit, and I thought I’d stick some unboxing pics up for all to see. You can check them out on Flickr here.
So I’m waiting on a few other bits to arrive (another stick of RAM, a replacement wifi card, and an external DVD...
5 tags
Lesser Known Classics #2: Queens of the Stone Age...
This is the second post in my series on classic albums that perhaps don’t get the recognition they deserve. The first in the series was about Rufio’s masterpiece, MCMLXXXV.
This post is about the Queens of the Stone Age album, Songs for the Deaf. Now it’d be hard to argue that QotSA are “lesser known” – they are a huge, well recognized band within the rock world, and have been making great...
6 tags
What's up Proc?
So it’s awesome Ruby snippet time, and in particular I’m going to look at the ability to evaluate statements against a block, specifically to find out where the particular block came from.
The “eval” command not only takes in the command to be executed, but can also optionally take in a binding to run against. This means that instead of evaluating a command against the current, local binding,...
6 tags
Meebo + Fluid
Much like my boy Mike, I’ve grown tired of Adium too. The app itself is great, but unfortunately the connection with MSN seems to be rather flakey. So I tried out Meebo, and it rocks. I’m using Fluid so that I can have it open in it’s own window. The only thing lacking was IM notifications for when the Meebo window doesn’t have the focus – or should I say, the only thing that WAS lacking? I’ve...
June 2008
6 posts
3 tags
Viva Las Vegas
So fellow Brit Peter Cooper mentioned on Twitter that he is getting married in September this year in Las Vegas. I said that my wife and I got married in Las Vegas last September, and he asked if I had any advice or tips to share. Unfortunately, 140 characters isn’t really enough :-)
We had an incredible time last year, and I wouldn’t have changed a thing. So for those like Peter who are...
9 tags
Call To Arms
So a quick Feather update: we’re now running against the latest stable versions of Merb (0.9.3) and DataMapper (0.9.1), which should make getting Feather up and running even easier. We’re also currently starting work on running against edge Merb, to try and implement merb-slices, so that Feather can be run as a slice within other apps, and so that Feather plugins themselves are slices in their own...
5 tags
Lesser Known Classics #1: Rufio - MCMLXXXV
This article is the first in a series of musical based posts, highlighting lesser known, great albums.
The first in the series is an album I’ve been listening to a lot on the commute into work this last week, MCMLXXXV (also known simply as 1985), the second album by the pop-punk band Rufio. Released back in 2003, and weighing in at almost 36 minutes, this album is a joy to listen to, start to...