https://martinwood.org/Freelance web developer based in Cardiff, UK. 2026-02-27T14:59:51+00:00 Martin Wood https://martinwood.org/ Jekyll © 2026 Martin Wood /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2021-04-01T18:23:30+01:00 2021-04-01T18:23:30+01:00 https://martinwood.org/getting-started-with-linode-object-storage-on-rails Martin

A current client project of mine involves a lot of image storage. A job for Amazon S3, right? That’s the default answer a lot of the time, but I’ve always found Amazon’s configuration and policy setups extremely long-winded so this time I thought what about using an alternative? As the project itself is hosted with Linode, trying out Linode Object Storage as an S3 compatible storage option fo...

2021-01-21T17:42:05+00:00 2021-01-21T17:42:05+00:00 https://martinwood.org/using-the-whenever-gem-in-multiple-environments Martin

In my Rails projects I invariably end up using the fantastic whenever gem to schedule cron tasks a project may require. With the whenever gem one can configure scheduled tasks using its DSL, e.g. : every 1.day, at: '4pm' do rake "membership:expire", output: 'log/membership_expire.log' end which gets converted into a standard UNIX cron entry line such as : 0 16 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'cd /...

2020-05-13T18:04:41+01:00 2020-05-13T18:04:41+01:00 https://martinwood.org/moving-a-homebrew-installation-to-another-machine Martin

I’ve had my main Mac desktop for development for over 6 years now and it is still going strong. More surprising is that I haven’t had to reinstall the operating system from scratch during that time, so it has transitioned from 10.4 Mavericks right up to Mojave today (no, I _still_ haven’t been brave enough to upgrade to much maligned Catalina). Over that time I’ve installed numerous (155 to b...

2020-04-29T18:06:29+01:00 2020-04-29T18:06:29+01:00 https://martinwood.org/always-be-learning Martin

If 20+ years of software development has taught me anything, it is to never stop learning. The rate of churn and advancement in this profession, especially in the web development sphere, means you can never switch off for too long. Fortunately I love learning – even if do sometimes fantasise of having a job where you could just do a 9-to-5 and switch off. How I keep learning: 30m of technic...

2020-04-15T17:35:30+01:00 2020-04-15T17:35:30+01:00 https://martinwood.org/still-vim Martin

I can’t remember the first time I used Vi or Vim. What I do remember is an old colleague espousing its virtues and after being wowed by the power of Vim macros I knew it was time to switch (I was briefly a Emacs user but never got on with the infamous kitchen-sinkiness of it, or the Lisp dialect config files). That was over 20 years ago and Vim has remained my editor of choice ever since (I’v...