Woops!
19 Oct 2012 ⦁ #oops
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Site’s been down for a while – sorry about that everyone!
Slides available for Railsconf 2011
18 May 2011
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Take a look fast because I’m sure some (not all) of these won’t last long. More are on the way as I comb through the twitter stream of speakers providing links.
Zach Holman – Double-Shipping Software for Profit – https://zachholman.com/talk/2011/railsconf Jeff Casimir – Fat Models Aren’t Enough – https://dl.dropbox.com/u/69001/Fat Models Aren’t Enough - RailsConf.pdf Matt Parker – Readme Driven Development – https://www.slideshare.net/moonmaster9000/readme-driven-development John Nunemaker – Why You Should Never Use an ORM – https://speakerdeck.com/u/jnunemaker/p/why-you-should-never-use-an-orm John Athayde and Bruce Williams – Building Bulletproof Views – https://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/59/Building Bulletproof Views Presentation.pdf Derek Collison – Cloud Foundry – The Rails Developer’s Perspective – https://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/59/Cloud Foundry – The Rails Developer’s Perspective Presentation.pdf Nick Gauthier – KnowSQL: Database Tricks To Make Your Life Easier – https://knowsql.heroku.com/ Clinton R. Nixon – Upgrading Legacy Rails Applications to Rails 3 – https://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/59/Upgrading Legacy Rails Applications to Rails 3 Presentation.pdf Mikel Lindsaar – Keeping Rails on the Tracks – https://www.slideshare.net/raasdnil/keeping-rails-on-the-tracks Adam Keys – Mixing a Persistence Cocktail – https://speakerdeck.com/u/therealadam/p/mixing-a-persistence-cocktail-1 Hiro Asari – 20 Productivity Tips pdf https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1788208/ProductivityTips.pdf keynote https://bit.ly/mqlGxi Matteo Latini – Building Bulletproof Views – https://therailsview.com/building-bulletproof-views-rc2011.pdf Bryan Liles – Active Support – https://smartic.us/doodads/presentations/railsconf2011/#1
That’s it. I’m going naked.
28 Dec 2009
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No, not without my clothes. That would be, just … not right.
This website had been in its previous state for a while, probably the last year or so, with little traction. The vast majority of this stagnation being due to my working on implementing a design put together by the always amazing Erika Greco (she designed my wife’s site – Bit By the Beauty Bug). I loved what Erika had done – and I worked on getting it juuuust right for a long time. After months and months of on and of work on implementing this beautiful work I decided – “It’s time to get back to the basics”. There’s no need to get stuck in the cycle of working and re-working ad nauseum (my name is not George Broussard).
So, I’m deciding to strip everything down to the barest of mark-up and style and concentrate on letting this “brand” or “identity” grow organically through either the content or whatever incremental changes I feel are right. Instead of trying to hit a done target, let’s get real and let this grow organically to a point where I feel it’s done enough.
What does this do for me, you might ask? It allows me to write without a nagging voice in the back of my head saying “you can publish this once the new redesign is live”. When new projects I’m working on launch – I’m just going to post something about it instead of worrying that “the portfolio section of the site isn’t done yet … oh the horror!”.
Over time I hope to make some incremental changes to make things less ugly, but only time will tell. I’ll be documenting things as they change for posterity’s sake so I can review how time has treated it, and maybe share its mutation with everyone with hopes any and all feedback would make me better.
So, please bear with me while I hang out here all exposed and vulnerable and stuff. It’s only appropriate to bring in 2010 like Baby New Year.
Air Edie
29 Apr 2009 ⦁ #brookline ⦁ #bulldog ⦁ #courtyard ⦁ #Edie ⦁ #english bulldog ⦁ #nikon ⦁ #photography
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These photos were taken one afternoon when I went to take the little Chubbster out to the courtyard. I ran into our neighbor Andrew as he was out their with his super-duper high-tech Nikon DSLR. Edie went nuts and the photos above are the result. A huge thanks to Andrew and an equally large thanks to the dog for being such a photogenic weirdo.
Session is Invalid – A Boneheaded Mistake Might be Your Problem
26 Oct 2008 ⦁ #cookies ⦁ #error ⦁ #memcached ⦁ #rails
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Here’s something I lost hours to thanks to my own boneheaded mistake (I think I might have “lack of sleep” to blame for this one – in conjunction with ignorance).
I changed my Rails app to use memcached as the caching store for obvious reasons. Some sql queries are just too expensive so why keep hitting the damn db over and over again? Here comes memcached to the rescue! … or not?
I made all the appropriate changes, installed memcache-client, and restarted my local dev environment only to be hit with an ugly
session_id “whole lots of letters and numbers blarghedy blargh” is invalid
With the last file in the stacktrace being mem_cache_store.rb. “What the hell? Everything looks good though!”After uninstalling any and every plugin that I didn’t need thinking maybe they were interfering with the cache store – newrelic_rpm, query_reviewer and of course cache_fu – the problem remained. I reverted to regular built in filesystem caching and another error shows up – something about a cookie being tampered with.
*Ding*
Where the hell is the session id stored? Of course it’s in a cookie. After bringing up firebug and deleting the cookie (or conversely probably just restarting the browser) the problem was gone.
My fatal flaws? I overwrote the config.action_controller.session :secret I had originally in development.rb with a new one in environment.rb and I didn’t restart my browser or delete that session cookie.
Ain’t that a bitch?
Contemplating the Journey From “Big Idea” to Success.
07 Feb 2008 ⦁ #business ⦁ #entrepreneurship ⦁ #ideas ⦁ #web
Last weekend Sara and I were in New York City, mostly for some events she wanted to attend that were sponsored by a blog network she’s part of. One of the things we were both looking forward to was a brunch on Sunday morning with some of the people that work for the network (Partially because I was allowed to go with her to this one! Ok, maybe only a little bit). Regardless, we had a really good time and talked about a lot of different topics – one of which was a non-existent product that I’ve been pondering for months now. A GPS-enabled card of some sort that could be used to track down a lost wallet, bag, purse, etc. It’s a no-brainer right? One of those “I would buy that in a second if they actually existed”, even though it doesn’t. The reason why is probably because of technological constraints – cost of parts that are that small that could transmit instead of just receive. But, once those parts are available – someone will prototype this up and will make a fortune. Unfortunately that someone won’t be me. I’ll wait around with my credit card in hand, waiting for a chance to purchase it (for my Mother and for Sara).
The conversation popped into my head today because of a post over at Mike Davidson’s blog about some of the big ideas that powered what he calls a “Slam-Dunk Startup” – Youtube, Hot-or-Not, Google and Amazon. One point he brings up is similar to the thought I had above, that it’s not just the idea but the ability to execute with the overwhelmingly difficult details of providing enough bandwidth, computing power and engineering know-how to hit it out of the park.
I often hear people say things like “if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I’d be rich”, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube. A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to build, from having the balls to allow brazen copyright violation, to building a great user experience, to scaling out the ability to serve millions of video streams a day. In other words, 99 out of 100 people who may have had the same idea at the same time would have failed to create anything remotely as successful as YouTube.
I couldn’t agree more. Having the chutzpah to take that idea, to make something of it, and then break through the barrier of monetary success and cultural ubiquity? That’s a huge mountain to climb. The amount to which I can relate to this is by no means applicable – but being a solo entrepreneur trying to build something (which is, by no means, that original) on his own is extremely difficult. This is the reason why I have so much respect for the people that have done it. The Alex Tews, Joshua Schacters and Gabe Riveras of the world have nothing but the most tremendous respect from me. Odds are that I’ll never reach those heights, but the journey so far has been the fun part. We’ll wait and see.
