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
Using the whenever Gem in multiple environments
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
Moving a Homebrew installation to another machine
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
Always Be Learning
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.
Still Vim
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
Schedule vs No Schedule
For years I’ve been obsessed with making schedules for my daily life, e.g. side-project time, learning time, exercise, etc. Why? I know that when I don’t have a set schedule, then none of the above will actually happen, and I
My Daily Shutdown Tasks
At the end of each of my working days (and invariably weekends too) I go through a list of my ‘Shutdown Tasks’ – a fixed checklist of things I need to complete before closing down my laptop lid for the
Running migrations on multiple servers with Capistrano
Typically the sites I work on have a traditional single Staging server, and a single Production server. Recently I’ve been working on a client project where we needed the same database schema (and subsequent migrations) deployed to multiple target servers.
Leading kids to coding
In common with the majority of developers, what led me to get involved in ‘programming’ in the first place was the hope of one day creating my own video games. This seemed magical – but not too far out of
Managing multiple projects with tmuxinator
Being a freelancer I get to work on several projects at a time. When I started out this sometimes mean’t juggling several projects in a single day, but for my sanity’s sake I moved over a single project per day