programming
We need to stop abstracting
December 11, 2011abstraction programming
Abstraction has been essential to make computing what it is today. Without it, we would all be writing assembly code. Abstraction allows us to think at a higher level and be comfortable the lower level is working well. It promotes reuse of code. It's a cornerstone of object-oriented programming. Read more...
Keep your project running locally
December 7, 2011programming deployment
Every web project starts out with the best intentions, running locally, unit testing, easy deployments, provisioning of servers. As a project moves on, some of these niceties drop by the wayside, specifically: The ability to run locally. Read more...
Why I love making CMS's
November 29, 2011programming CMS personal
The most common application that I have built has been the good old fashioned content management system. This includes more than blogs though, I would argue that anything where a user can edit content without changing a codebase is a CMS. However, just off the top of my head, Jekyll is absolutely a CMS but still doesn't fit into that already generous bucket. Read more...
node.js introduction
November 26, 2011programming javascript node-js
node.js is an event-driven web server written in javascript.
node.js is popular with big CS nerds. I had a very difficult time understanding exactly 'what it was' when I first heard about it. This is my attempt to explain it for those of us without a neckbeard. Read more...
CarrierWave on Heroku with CloudFront
November 25, 2011programming rails carrierwave
This post will enable you to have your Rails app accept file uploads through a gem called CarrierWave. Optionally, you can use CloudFront in order to have a CDN backbone for those files. This is currently the best method for file uploading on Heroku. Read more...
Unix tips du jour
November 24, 2011programming unix bash
The thing about unix tools is they are incredibly hard to learn. Even if you understand a tool, you need to build it into your workflow, which takes serious time and experience. Here's just a quick intro into 2 simple ones, and one complex one for you to chew on: Read more...
The Great Redis Misapprehension
November 23, 2011redis databases memcache
Redis is NOT a database.
It's closer to memcache than mysql, for example. However, it's not a cache either. Read more...