Collected Writings
The Morning Read
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Samples of today’s self-education:
UI Fundamentals for Programmers From Ryan Singer at 37 Signals. Excellent discussion on function-driven design, and a nice smackdown of Balsamiq at the end.
RailsCast: Include vs. Joins Helped to firm up my understand of :include and :joins in ActiveRecord.
Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters A programmatic approach to CSS. It may be [...]
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Sharing A Workspace With Perforce
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
We here at the SHA webteam use Perforce for our version control system. It’s nice in many ways, but it can be a little unwieldy at times. Recently, I wanted to use a second computer at work, but wanted to use the same workspace I’ve been using for the past year. My [...]
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Why You Don’t Need an AfterFind Callback in Rails
Thursday, June 04, 2009
I came to Rails from a background in CakePHP. In the course of my experience with that framework, I really started to embrace the concept of Model callbacks: methods that are run automatically at specifics points during common actions, like beforeSave, beforeRender, afterSave, and afterFind, to name a few.
I used to use the afterFind [...]
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So I Gave This Talk….
Friday, May 08, 2009
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to give a talk about our recent work with the SHA LaunchPad redesign and Rails project for the regional conference of the Higher Education Web Professionals Organization, which was hosted here at Cornell by the tireless Jason Woodward.
It was a great conference, with some very interesting talks. [...]
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Did you know that POST variables are always passed as strings?
Friday, May 08, 2009
Because I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t think much about it. And dammit, I should’ve.
As you can probably tell, I spent a long time trying to figure out a very simple problem. This is one of those posts that is inspired by the (vain) hope that maybe, just maybe, I can spare someone [...]
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