May 2012
8 posts
Cedar goes General Availability on Heroku →
The HourSchool Blog: How can companies ask better... →
hourschool:
One core pillar of human-centered design is the idea of seeing the world through other people’s eyes, gaining empathy for their worldview, and meeting them where they are. Many companies are getting on board with the idea of putting the user or customer at the center of their business and design…
4 tags
Sextant: A Gem to Help you Find your Routes
News flash, writing a Rails app without knowing your routes is pretty much impossible, and this just in $ rake routes takes forever [1] to run. So how can we build a Rails site with a minimum of time and a maximum of awesome? You can use the recently released Sextant Gem [2] to generate routes in your Rails app.
As it turns out if you benchmark the code in $ rake routes it is reasonably fast,...
4 tags
OAuth: A Tale of Two Servers
What exactly is OAuth, and how can you use it to access data on sites like Facebook? This introductory video explains the basic flow behind OAuth 2 and how OAuth Clients are implemented.
If you’re using OAuth, you’ll likely want to use a pre-built client library to help with the process. For Ruby you’ll likely want to use Omniauth or Koala, though understanding the process is...
4 tags
Deploy & Edit a Facebook App in 5 Min
Ever want to write an App that uses the Facebook graph? You could be the next Zynga, Foursquare, or Causes; but first you need to create your app. This quick demo shows getting started by generating an app through Facebook and then editing it. If you’ve already got a working web app it’s simple to add Facebook functionality to it, though we’ll save that for another day. What are...
3 tags
Multiple Ruby Version Support on Heroku
Starting today Heroku will allow you to specify a version of Ruby in your production app. As one of the most requested features we have been asked for time and time again, we’re happy to announce that it’s now live. To get started you’ll want to update your version of Bundler locally to version 1.2.0, or above.
This is a re-post of an Article I wrote for the Heroku Blog
$...
3 tags
Wicked Gem Featured on Railscasts →
Wicked was featured by Ryan Bates on Railscasts this past week. I’ve learned quite a bit over the years from Railscasts, so it’s a great honor to have my work featured there.
5 tags
Legacy Concerns in Rails
The cats out of the bag, Ruby isn’t immune to legacy code problems. Just because your app is written in a hip, fun, and dynamic language doesn’t mean that your codebase can’t stagnate, bloat, and quickly turn into an unmaintainable ball of mud. Before Gowalla was purchased by Facebook, the Rails code base stood at close to seven thousand files, with the largest model clocking in...
April 2012
6 posts
4 tags
Building an iOS Photo-sharing and Geolocation... →
My good friend @mattt just released this great tutorial for creating an iOS Photo-Sharing app on Rails. You should hop, skip, or jump on over to the article now. What are you waiting for?
8 tags
Concerned about Code Reuse?
Right out of the gate, Ruby gives us some powerful ways to re-use instance and class methods without relying on inheritance. Modules in Ruby can be used to mixin methods to classes fairly easily. For example, we can add new instance methods using include.
module DogFort
def call_dog
puts "this is dog!"
end
end
class Dog
include DogFort
end
Now we’re able to call any methods...
Partial Validation of Active Record Objects in...
This question comes up a lot, people want to have an object, lets call it a Product that they want to create in several different steps. Let’s say our product has a few fields name, price, and category and to have a valid product all these fields must be present.
This is a re-post of a wiki I wrote for Wicked.
While it was written to be used with a wizard, the pattern can be used...
6 tags
Performance Testing Rails with BlitzIO
Haven’t you always wanted to make some changes to your server and then absolutely slam it with traffic to see the result? Thats pretty much what I did last week while writing how to Super Charge your Rails App with Rack Cache, using the BlitzIO tool.
If you’re interested in trying out Blitz watch a demo in the screencast below.
For a walkthrough on how to add Rack::Cache and...
5 tags
8 tags
Super Charge your Rails App with Rack Cache and...
Slow is sweeping the nation: slow food, slow living, and slow reading. Unfortunately your app called, it said it wants to be fast. Web apps that respond quickly are more enjoyable to work with and Google even gives them a small SEO bump. Recently basecamp next got quite a bit of customer love based on how quickly it responds. The fact of the matter is if it’s on the web, fast matters.
...
March 2012
5 posts
5 tags
You got NoSQL in my Postgres! Using Hstore in...
Heroku just announced their support of hstore in their dedicated Postgres 9.1 instances. Hstore is a schema less key value store inside of PostgreSQL that allows us to store data like hashes directly inside of a column. It’s great for when you don’t know exactly what types of attributes you need to store on a model, or if you need to support many different attributes for the same...
3 tags
6 tags
Test Drive: Induction - The Everything Database...
Join me for a quick demo of Induction, the latest project by @Mattt from Heroku. Induction will let you view your data-stores including: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, and so much more. The alpha product also lets you run queries, and visualize data.
Induction is completely free and open source, for more info visit the website or clone the repo.
4 tags
Give Tumblr Some Code
Lets admit it, code and Tumblr don’t exactly get along right now. Sure you can write your posts in markdown, but there isn’t really an out of the box experience for syntax highlighting in code blocks.
In the past I’ve resorted to using Gists to store code in my blog, but this can be a hassle to manage, especially if you need to modify your code later. One day I noticed that one...
February 2012
6 posts
Wizard-ify Your Rails Controllers with Wicked
If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, I was going crazy writing step-by-step wizards.
I was never happy with the end result, they did what I wanted, but were messy and had too many moving parts. I wanted a simple & re-usable way to create restful-ish controllers. Thats when I decided to rip out all that scary controller logic and bake it into in a Gem I call...
2 tags
Journey to the Center of Geekdom
I thought I was spoiled when I worked for Gowalla, but Heroku appeals to my true inner Geek. The people, the building, and the oh-so-delicious food have blown my mind. It’s impossible to turn the corner without bumping into some of the best minds in the community. Where else are you going to find yourself walking to work with @hone02, a maintainer of Bundler, and playing pingpong after lunch...
3 tags
Epic Job is Epic
When Gowalla was acquired by Facebook I wrote that I was talking to companies in Austin and California in Should I Stay or Should I Go. I’m happy to announce that I’ve made a decision on where I’m going next.
Now you must be wondering… is it Austin, is it California? Actually it’s both. I’m starting work today for Heroku which is in San Francisco, though...
4 tags
Learn Ruby with Hourschool
I’m teaching a beginner ruby class. If you’ve ever been interested in learning Ruby this is a hands on class with no experience and no software required. Class is this Wednesday the 15th at 7pm in downtown Austin.
If you’ve never taken a class at Hourschool before, it’s a peer-to-peer learning platform that lets anyone teach and take classes. It’s been a fun way to...
3 tags
Turn Any Presentation into a Screencast
Remember that great presentation you gave at that user group? What about that one at the conference, you know the one everyone loved. What if your presentation wasn’t limited by the number of seats in the room or badges sold at a desk. What if, and this is a bit crazy, you could use some sort of electronic device to record your presentation and share it using a series of connected tubes.
...
5 tags
Quit Complaining About a Talent Shortage and...
Today a lowly programing peon fails a devious whiteboarding interview torture trap! After candidate leaves, the interviewer asks their colleges, “why are there no good programmers available?”. Well…
Recently I’ve heard two common complaints, first from companies looking to hire not finding talent, and the second from programmers looking for new jobs only to find a...
January 2012
2 posts
openrbg asked: Hi I'm looking for the "correct" way to convert a gzip request body and found this ref - schemes <dot> com/2010/10/13/use-rack-middleware-to-customize-rails-parameter-parser/ -- It appears to be missing from tumblr archive.. I wonder if you could provide another pointer or the content ? -- Appreciate any help you could provide. Robert.
5 tags
Speed up Capybara Tests with Devise
All good developers should write tests, and anyone with a high stake in a web app should write acceptance tests. Acceptance tests use a web driver like Capybara to test the full functionality of your web app by interacting directly with view elements the same way a user would (clicking links, filling out forms, etc.)
My only problem with acceptance tests is that they can be a bit slow, so...
December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Keep your Rails Project Sane
We’ve all been there, we start a new project with grand hopes and aspirations. But soon enough our project turns into one big ball of mud. In this presentation I talk about some common mistakes in Rails and how to keep your project Sane.
I gave this presentation at Austin On Rails and it was filmed by Austin Tech Videos.
3 tags
Bootstrap A Fork of Rails
If you want to make a change to Rails, you probably want to test out your change in an existing project. Here is what I needed to do to get an example project running on my fork of Rails:
First: Fork Rails
Before you can run a custom copy of Rails you’ll want to make a fork and then clone your fork to your local machine.
Go to https://github.com/rails/rails and click the Fork button.
...
4 tags
Help Me, Help Rails
Rails needs controller level filter logging and Im submitting a patch to Rails core, but first I want some feedback. Let me know if you like it, hate it, or don’t understand it. All comments welcome, especially alternative implementation & style.
Please let me know what you think, please leave comments on the original gist: https://gist.github.com/1443757
3 tags
Should I Stay or Should I Go...
Gowalla was acquired by Facebook and I’m left with a decision of what to do next.
This post best read while listening to The Clash
Its been a wild and crazy ride at Gowalla, I’ve enjoyed making some great features and a build a revolutionary product. No mater what happens the band is breaking up, and the curtains are closing in. Some of us are forging towards and will continue to...
November 2011
5 posts
6 tags
Vimeo Vs. YouTube for Technical Videos
Congrats, you did a killer presentation or screencast, now you want to upload it to the interwebs and share with the world, but what service should you use? I’ve used both YouTube and Vimeo and wanted to compare and contrast the two.
Appearance
I love the look and feel of Vimeo, it appeals to my tastes, and feels like a crafted app versus a video marketplace. It embeds well in my blog,...
Scaling the Web: Databases & NoSQL
Video and Slides from a guest lecture I presented at the University of Texas school of Information. This is an introduction to relational and non-relational databases and how their performance affects scaling a web application.
In this talk I address the technologies and tools Gowalla uses including PostgreSQL, Memcached, Redis and Cassandra.
Video
Slides
Open Source Libraries
Gowalla...
6 tags
Stack Overflow Needs Mentors
First off, I love Stack Overflow. In the way that only someone who taught himself programming via outdated books, and old-school programming forums can. I think it’s the best way to ask most programming questions on the web, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get better.
Background: Today I just helped my girlfriend @rubyku signup for a stack overflow account. I did this...
4 tags
Likeable: Love your Objects with Redis
This is a re-post of an article I wrote for Gowalla’s Engineering Blog. You can view the original article here.
Likeable is a new open-source Ruby library that we built here at Gowalla to power all of the “loves” on stories, comments, highlights and photos that you see. It’s built on top of Redis to be extremely simple, isolated and fast. Likeable plays well with ActiveRecord...
4 tags
So You Want to Hire an Intern?
This is a re-post of an article I wrote for Gowalla’s Engineering Blog. You can view the original article here.
So You Want to Hire an Intern?
This past summer, Gowalla brought on its second intern, Michael May, a Computer Science undergrad from the University of Texas. In turn, Michael brought us a great amount of enthusiasm and ability.
I had the pleasure of...
October 2011
2 posts
3 tags
Gowalla's New Engineering Blog
Gowalla started and engineering blog, highlighting our open source projects and giving all of us devs a special place to talk about things we care about.
What are you waiting for check it out now!!
3 tags
Git Aliases
Ever see someone checkout a git repo by simply typing `git co master` instead of the HORRIBLY LONG IMPOSSIBLY DIFFICULT `git checkout master` ? I know I have, so to save me HOURS a day I added these aliases to my ~/.gitconfig to my git config file.
[alias]
st = status
ci = commit
br = branch
co = checkout
df = diff
dc = diff --cached
lg = log -p
lol = log...
September 2011
2 posts
Replace IRB with PRY for Rails Dev
I use PRY to develop Rails, so should you: Set up Pry with Rails
I use the .pryrc method, works great. I can reload! and still get the magic of Pry.
If you’re new to pry check out this intro: Pry Railscast
Custom Dotfiles
I use custom organization of my .bashrc and .bash_profile i.e. my “dotfiles”. Its great to keep all of my aliases clean and organized. I highly recommend Peepcode’s Advanced Command Line for more info on configuring your own set of custom dotfiles.
The one thing I always forget how to do whenever I move to a new computer or hard-drive is to set up the correct files and set up...
August 2011
3 posts
Some of my Login UX featured in SmashingMagazine →
When i first started working for Gowalla, I implemented some UX improvements to the existing login form. I thought it was pretty nifty and so did SmashingMagazine. Check out their writeup
13 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 (Final) Week 8
This is final part of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
Closing assignment:
Go To Austin on Rails
As questions at meet ups & on online forums
come up with a crazy rails project and just do it
stick to it until you’re done
repeat until you’re a fabulously wealthy or happy (whichever comes first)
Rails 3...
8 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 7
This is part 7 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011.
Assignment before next week (Week 8): Chapters 18, 19, & 20 and deploy your application to Heroku.
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 7 from richard schneeman on Vimeo.
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 7
View more presentations from Richard...
July 2011
5 posts
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an...”
– John Steinbeck (via jonthornton)
7 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 6 with Ethan...
This is part 6 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011 with special guest speaker Ethan Waldo
Assignment before next week (Week 7): Chapters 15, 16, 17
We will NOT be meeting on July 21st, due to a conflict with Austin.rb (which i highly recommend you attend). Its a going to be a great meeting, and I hope to see many of you there.
...
4 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 5
This is part 5 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
Assignment before next week (Week 6): Chapters 12, 13, & 14
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 5 from richard schneeman on Vimeo.
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 5 View more
presentations from Richard Schneeman
Topics:
- Data Flow
...
11 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 4
This is part 3 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
Assignment before next week (Week 5): Chapters 10 & 11
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 4 from richard schneeman on Vimeo.
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 3 View more presentations from Richard Schneeman
Topics:
- HTML
- CSS
-...
June 2011
3 posts
9 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 3
This is part 3 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builderseries. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
Assignment before next week (Week 4): Chapters 8 & 9 (Task C & D)
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 3 from richard schneeman on Vimeo.
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 3 View more presentations from Richard Schneeman
Topics:
- Ruby
-...
14 tags
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 2
This is part 2 of my Rails 3: Beginner to Builder series. http://schneems.com/beginner-to-builder-2011
Assignment before Week 3: Chapters 6 & 7
Video
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 2 from richard schneeman on Vimeo.
Slides
Rails 3 Beginner to Builder 2011 Week 2
View more presentations from Richard Schneeman.
Topics:
- Rails
- Code...