My first remote gig was in 2005 – and since 2007, apart from some brief dalliances with on-site work, I’ve been fully remote. This suits my (highly) introverted personality. I find working in grou...

David Allen’s 2002 book ‘Getting Things Done‘ (GTD) certainly struck a chord with programmer types. Unfortunately the classic GTD system espoused by Allen seems to fall apart over time. The bigges...

One of my long-term client projects involves frequent data migrations (as opposed to the classical schema migrations one typically runs). Up until recently I’ve been creating standalone rake tasks...

Since 2007 I’ve been living my personal Holy Grail – that of a freelance developer working remotely from home. This, like most worthwhile things in life, has taken a large dollop of discipline,...

I’ve just spent some time wondering why a “git svn clone <repo>” followed by a “git svn fetch” was producing no files in the target folder. This was puzzling, as the Subversion repository wa...

After a gap of almost six years I’ve been grabbed by the sudden urge to start doing some Cocoa development again. Rather than get my old battered copy of Hillegass’ seminal Cocoa Programming for M...

Many moons ago (well, late 2006) I wrote my first Rails application, a dinky little GTD app named ZenLists. Now, I haven’t given the app much though for the last eighteen months, and the shocking ...

Having just completed my first mISV product, I’m already starting to think about potential new projects. Despite Datafeed Studio being written in PHP, it is fair to say it is not my programming la...

Well, I’ve only gone and done it, folks. I’ve finally become a bona fide Micro-ISV (mISV). Today marks the launch of my first product, Datafeed Studio – a web application that allows affiliate ma...

Now that the first release candidate of Rails 2.0 has been announced, what better time to check if your existing Rails app might need some TLC before the upgrade? Enter r2check, a small tool which...