Posts Tagged ‘programming’

The Rubynator

// August 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology

LSRC-2009-webMy friend Geof has for years attempted to persuade of me of the pure awesomeness of Ruby on Rails, and the many ways that it excels over any other language/framework. So in honor of his efforts to constantly evangelize me with the “Oh is much easier in Rails” (and of Dr. Doofenshmirtz, one of my cartoon heroes), I think I’ll start calling him The Rubynator.

I’m no neo-luddite, and I’m generally an early adopter, but have approached Ruby and Rails with only an arms-length interest. But having spent some time this summer doing my own research, I’ve become convinced to embrace it on a couple of big projects at work that are separate platforms from our core product. I’m looking forward to it. One thing I’ve noticed (how can you miss it, they practically yell it), is how much I enjoy and appreciate the culture that’s developed alongside Ruby on Rails in terms of making applications and code elegant, concise, readable, and easy to maintain. The Rails framework seems to make it easy to do things the right way, and I believe the lessons we’ll learn in developing RoR applications will help my team and I become better developers in general, regardless of the development environment we use, and I’m excited about that.

I’m also looking forward to attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference this weekend in Austin and seeing what I can learn.

Google Mashup-O-Matic

// June 8th, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

Google Mashup-O-MaticWell…almost.

For all of you aspiring to make your first million by wedding your livelihood to Google’s P&L’s … they have a new product for you.

Google has released the Google Mashup Editor to beta.

Simply put, it does this:

The Google Mashup Editor provides simple tools and features that allow you to create mashups in minutes.

  • A set of tags that compiles into AJAX UI components
  • Syntax highlighting
  • Autocomplete of gm tags by pressing the tab button
  • Quick access to documentation for any tag by pressing F2
  • File upload and management
  • Error checking and notification

So, Google once again has made it stupid-simple to begin monetizing SaaS PIG’s and launch a Micro-ISV empire! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

jQuery Plugins

// June 6th, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

jQuery PluginsMy friend Geof over at McKinney Station Design pointed me to jQuery Plugins a few weeks back. I’ve been really impressed with some of them.

I particularly like the Thickbox image gallery popup, the Ajax tab navigation, and the client-side table sorter.

Optimizing WordPress For High Traffic Volume

// June 1st, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

WordPressRan across an excellent article today on TurboChargedCMS about a combination of techniques to speed up WordPress using, in part a Squid reverse proxy (learn how to setup a squid reverse proxy server here).

As an aside, I’ve also heard good things from friends who have used the open-source PHP accelerator eAccelerator.

Programming Language Wars, Part One

// March 7th, 2007 // No Comments » // Technology

PHPTim O’Reilly has an article on O’Reilly Radar entitled Programming Language Wars, Part One, where he discusses books sales on the major programming languages.

Interestingly, book sales in those areas fell overall YoY for the last year, with the exceptions being Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL. JavaScript was up sharply, driven (as he says) by the interest in Ajax programming.

Even my beloved PHP was off, but then why would anyone buy a book when the online docs are some of the best in the industry?