Artificial Intelligence
What is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda, for those not familiar with it, is an event driven serverless (what is serverless?) platform for compute resources
TOPIC
Ruby
Artificial Intelligence
How Static Code Analysis Taught Me About Change Management
Recently, I helped spearhead our department’s adoption of centralized static code analysis.
The Cloud
Managing IIS Configuration With Puppet Powershell DSC
Many of us in DevOps/Cloud/Site Reliability/System Engineering have long been using Puppet to manage our Apache and Nginx configurations. However it...
Education
The Open Source Apprenticeship Model
The software industry is facing a workforce shortage of unprecedented proportions.
Database
Autocomplete Using ActiveAdmin and Rails 3
I love how easy ActiveAdmin is to use out of the box, but it can force you into using a panoply of workarounds for forms with any significant level...
The Cloud
Full Stack Basics for the Non-Developer
Let's visualize and talk about the "full stack" of web development.
JavaScript
Javascript WAT: ECMAScript Abstract Equality Comparison Algorithm
I'm assuming most of you saw Gary Bernhardt's talk from CodeMash 2012 on some WAT™ features in Ruby and JavaScript.
Education
Seeing Long Term Technology Adoption as Evolution
Much like an evolutionary tree our goal in technology adoption is too continue to move forward and evolve, rather than getting caught in a dead end....
Education
The Challenge to Innovation
Recently inspired by Peter Thiel's excellent book Zero to One, I've been reflecting on the software industry as the preeminent place where we can...
Agile
10 Months as a Junior Developer
I am now within a couple days of having survived as a Junior Developer at Metal Toad for 10 whole months.
DevOps
Keeping track of page load times in Munin
As part of the services we provide for some of our clients, we monitor web page load times. The Munin plugin we were using at the time was this...
Drupal
Fixing "no such file" error in Capistrano upload()
Last week, this error brought many of our deployments to a screeching halt. "upload via sftp failed on metaltoad.com: Net::SFTP::StatusException...
Artificial Intelligence
Metal Toad Hosts Women Who Hack
On Sunday, we welcomed Women Who Hack, a monthly gathering "for women who want to hack on projects with or around other women.
Design
The Myth of the Specialized Programmer
Ever heard of it? Apparently there is this mystical creature who is a master of his trade, knows all the tricks in the book and is generally just...
Capistrano
Parse / extract server settings from your Capfile
One interesting thing that has evolved from our use of Capistrano is the configuration files have become the de-facto documentation hub for a...
Artificial Intelligence
Boilerplate 1.0 for Drupal 7: Responsive HTML5 & SASS
Great HTML5 support based on the excellent Boilerplate HMTL5 template, full SASS support, and a base fixed/flexible responsive layout similar to Zen...
Artificial Intelligence
The Framework is dead. Long live the CMS.
If you don't know already, the framework is dead.
Drupal
What's in a framework, experiences from Rails and Drupal
I've now been working professionally in Drupal for a year and have learned a lot about it; I have some patches into contrib but I've not really done...
Drupal
Drupal snippets #1 (Views exposed filters, F5 tweaks)
While I'm certain that I could never work up to the standards of Peter Cooper his "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don't Need Separate Posts" series...
Artificial Intelligence
Deployment with Capistrano Part 2: Drush integration
In my last post, a basic intro to to running cap deploy was presented. Now, let's look at some more advanced scenarios. (See Part 1 for the actual...
Drupal
Capistrano: Drupal deployments made easy, Part 1
I'm a big fan of having an automated deployment process. It's really the web development analog to the "one step build process", as described in the...
Drupal
The Power of Yes (within Frameworks)
Of all the powerful words in any language assertion is in my opinion the absolute most powerful. With affermative language we are able to create...
Drupal
Fun with stakeout.rb
Having only left Rubyville a couple weeks ago there are still a lot of Ruby-based utilities that I still find incredibly handy. One such utility that...