I have a confession to make. When I start a new work or freelance project, I often become obsessed with the search to find the perfect tool to help me get the job done. For some reason, I love the process of researching, testing, and comparing software and web applications and I jump at the […]
Google made a big announcement Monday night that has the web development community talking. They announced and released a preview version of App Engine, a set of tools that lets you quickly build web applications and deploy them to Google’s infrastructure for instant scalability. I want to talk a bit about why it is important […]
I don’t think I’ve officially mentioned this on my blog before, but one of the two businesses I helped startup is a company called Greeneye e-Manifest. What we do, in a nutshell, is make very easy for Canadian trucking companies to submit an electronic manifest of what’s in their trailers, and where it’s coming from, […]
The increasing number of web frameworks means that design and development best practices are accessible to more people than ever before and are a sign of a maturing industry.
The primary goal of most web development frameworks is to save development time. Since most programming projects share a good deal of redundant code (database connectivity, error […]
Just the other day I was considering moving this blog into WordPress instead of the various versions of Movable Type I’ve been using to run this thing for almost four years now. There were a few reasons I was thinking about doing this:
I’m a tweaker, and like to try new things I’ve used WordPress to manage several […]
My Facebook lovefest continues. Late yesterday they announced the latest version of the Facebook Platform, which opens up the site (and its millions and millions of users) for 3rd parties to build on. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, just know this: It’s a very big deal.
TechCrunch calls Facebook the “Anti-MySpace”, and for good […]
Facebook released some of its home-grown software architecture as open source a few days ago. They’ve called it Thrift, and can be downloaded from their developer site for free.
Browsing through Thrift’s whitepaper (PDF), I’m still trying to completely understand it. It appears to provide a consistent way for different programming languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, C++) […]
One of my friends recently asked me what I’m using for extensions in Firefox 2, then suggested I share my list with the world. So, that’s exactly what I’m doing here. I’ll split them up by category so you can find the ones that apply to you.
Improving the Firefox Interface
Even though Firefox is amazing out of […]
I recently deployed a Ruby on Rails application to Media Temple’s Dedicated Virtual Server 3.0 setup, and after running into a few problems along the way, eventually got everything working nicely.
I decided to publish my steps and documentation for anyone else who might possibly benefit from what I learned. If you’re not in that very […]
I’m in the middle of an absolutely awesome Technometria podcast with David Platt, author of the book Why Software Sucks. The episode is titled, appropriately enough, Why Software Sucks, the Podcast. It’s very much worth checking out.
David has got some really good examples of what’s wrong with software today. His book blog (Suckbusters) covers some […]