Mind-blowingly great post from Firefox’s lead designer (now a dead link) Aza Raskin on the power of prototyping as communication, why you need to start with design and how to communicate ideas visually since it’s all about influencing people. Like, wow… And very topical for my team at the moment (which does not have a designer or front-end engineer). And it definitely re-affirms Agile as a process.
To Design is to inspire participation.
Great list of paradoxes on the use of cloud computing from the always insightful O’Reilly Radar. We use cloud services heavily at GetUp, mostly because we have no real infrastructure and try to avoid long-term investment to stay lean, but these are excellent thought exercises to go through if you’re the CIO/CTO of your org.
First off, I should probably tell you that I totally ♥ Heroku . I run a bunch of little apps off it and at work believe it’s production ready for our main platform. A while back someone posted a nice little snippet of how to get a static site working on it in two lines of code on heroku, however, with some change in heroku, gem packaging or the like (or fact I added in multiple custom domains for the site), these static served pages suddenly stopped working. Counterintuitive when looked at, and even @radar and I together looking at it couldn’t figure it out. Anyhow, I puzzled the following out. Probably a few of the gems can be removed but this definitely worked for me.
If you’re a CTO moving heavily into cloud services, one of the things that keeps you awake at night is what happens if one of your providers goes under or just becomes so unreliable you have to move. Let’s face it, lock in goes along with the cloud as the fact of the matter is you code to exploit a specific platform.
The amazing thing about Fog is that it acts as a universal interface in front of the cloud, allowing you to control a variety of cloud services though a unified API. It deals with both servers and storage already supporting EC2, Rackspace servers, vCloud and Slicehost and numerous cloud based storage vendors S3 and Rackspace Files.
I’m posting this because someone I did a Hack night with hadn’t yet checked out the awesome rvm in order to muck around with Rails 3. If you’re a Rail or Rubyista you need to install it and start messing around with 1.9.x and the wonders that are Rails 3. Here’s how.
Rails is now at beta 3 which means a release candidate is right around the corner. While fundamentally more complex under the hood than 2.x (though the devs claim it’s easier to understand now), 3 provides some fundamental advantages (and some key changes) you probably need to get up to speed with if you don’t want to be left behind.
I have to admit to being in awe of people who can both code and whip up a kick ass looking design. Particularly one that looks good and has good user experience. While I can code backends, I’d say my design skills are pretty paltry, particularly when it comes to doing things like lightbox overlays, fades, zoom in overlays and other jQuery goodness. But I’m not proud about it. It’s something I’m kinda embarrassed about (and have a stack of reading material to deal with - that I’ll get through one day).
One of the things I really love about the ruby community is its inherent sense of fun. Beside the fact there are a lot of really smart, talented and very creative devs in it and at the RailsCamps (at least here in Aus), and some of the best stuff is just the things they whip up in their more whimsical moments.
One of these has to be rubywarrior (thanks to <Ritchie K. for introducing me to this one at Railcamp 7 in Canberra). Written by Railscasts stalwart Ryan Bates it’s there to teach you Ruby. And it rocks.
I have to admit to have become more and more enamoured of heroku for production class hosting of Rails and Ruby applications. It makes things pretty painless (see my first post on gotchas for my first deploy there) and for Nunemaker’s rather strong sentiment, You’re An Idiot for Not Using Heroku .
It does kick ass if you’re getting stuff up fast, but if you’re moving into more serious production environments with multiple devs and you also need a staging environment, the simple git heroku push master gets to be too simple. You really need something capistrano
-esque for managing deployment even to heroku.
My new place is moving from being a startup to having to put in places some things you need for the longer term running of a charity. So, I’ve been fiddling with a few apps. I’d deployed one which works perfectly in dev and test and one of my staff, when I said i was about to spin up an EC2 instance to host it, mentioned it was small enough we could run probably run it for free on the everyone-gushes-about-it Heroku (which is something I’ve thought about some of my other personal apps).
Hands down the best (and most fun) Development Manager I’ve ever worked with and former Riptown peep, Core, doing a presentation at Ignite Toronto on how Software Development is like Kung Fu (I should point out that my first ever lunch with Corey first day on the new gig revolved around Asian cinema in a way that frightened both existing staff and newcomers alike who were present).
I am so stealing slides from this presentation. Awesome job Core!