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 s...
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. ...
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 tim...
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...
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 ...
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 abo...
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...
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...
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 fa...
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 p...