Dec. 29, 2011 at 11:01am with 1 note
A great decade…

I don’t talk about my age to often, mostly because I feel very fortunate to have had so many opportunities at a relatively young age, but milestones are a convenient time to reflect on such things and today is one of those. Today is the last day of my 20s.

Looking back, I’m amazed by the number of experiences I’ve had in such a short amount of time. While those experiences are what stand out in something like the list below, the people that have surrounded me during those have been even more impactful on who I am today.

The list below is more for an older version of me than for you, but feel free to enjoy if you’d like:

20 - First non-assignment hacking. First HTML site. First Flash site. (Everyone makes mistakes in their youth.)

21 - First exposure to dynamic web applications. (Shout out to Brandon Turner who was slinging Perl to make things happen on the web.) PHP development.

22 - .NET development. Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia. Engaged to Shevawn.

23 - Married Shevawn. Playa del Carmen. Start contracting full time. Introduced to Ruby on Rails. (Thanks Matt Dean!) Full time Ruby on Rails. London.

24 - Graduate from Texas A&M. (Finally!) Contract with Trabian and The Garland Group.

25 - Find Dallas Ruby. Start at The Garland Group. First Mac. Switzerland, Italy, Greece.

26 - First Dallas Ruby talk. First house. First conference speaking gig. Chicago Christmas.

27 - Lake Tahoe. Claire is born. Start at Sabre.

28 - Lots of doctors and hospitals. Cabo.

29 - Lauren is born. Contest Apps and the “Chirpa” series. First training gig. Start leading Dallas Ruby. Start at LivingSocial.

While that is a great looking list, I’m even more excited about what the next one will look like.

Dec. 7, 2011 at 9:31am
Attention email marketers. This is the interface I use to quickly view, sort, and filter my email. It’s the place I decide what’s worth reading and what isn’t. If you waste half of the space allotted with “To view this email with images click here” or “Ensure delivery by adding…” or “If this message is not displayed properly click here”, well then there is a very slim chance that I will actually open your email. I doubt I am alone in this. That is all.

Attention email marketers. This is the interface I use to quickly view, sort, and filter my email. It’s the place I decide what’s worth reading and what isn’t.

If you waste half of the space allotted with “To view this email with images click here” or “Ensure delivery by adding…” or “If this message is not displayed properly click here”, well then there is a very slim chance that I will actually open your email. I doubt I am alone in this.

That is all.

Sep. 4, 2011 at 4:13pm
ruby_chopped

A few weeks ago I released a fun little project as part of whyday called ruby_chopped.

The idea is modeled after the Food Network show where expert chefs are given a basket of random items and told to make a dish from the contents. In the same way, ruby_chopped creates a project for you with a random set of gems, and asks you to do something great with them.

It was a fun project for several reasons:

  1. I had never built a gem with an accompanying command line executable. Good learning there. (And even more through the pull requests…)
  2. People wanted to add stuff to it! Within the first 5 or 6 hours I had two pull requests to greatly improve the executable and the way projects were built. Within 24 hours there were 2 more with additional options and features.
  3. Not only did it allow for others to contribute to OSS, but gave me chance to contribute to a different OSS project…more on that later.

All in all a great time and another reminder that sometimes this hobby turned job can still be a fun hobby!

Aug. 3, 2011 at 10:40pm
SeedMe - Creating a data seed file from your Rails development database

I ran into a situation last night where I was trying to get a skeleton site up on heroku, but I wanted to include the data I had created in my dev db. There wasn’t a ton of data, but I still didn’t want to create it again manually. (That heroku run console can end up cost you money…like whole penneis…)

After a quick Google search didn’t find me anything that fit the bill, I set to build a quick a dirty one…and 30 minutes later I had SeedMe.

Source: http://github.com/markmcspadden/seed_me

Download: https://rubygems.org/gems/seed_me

All SeedMe does is look at your database (using ActiveRecord) and then creates a db/seeds.rb file that you can in turn use to populate other databases with ‘rake db:seed’

There’s probably other stuff out there that does this, and this gem is very basic so your mileage may vary. But I do like the functionality…and even more so like that I was able to get the problem solved and turned into a gem in such a short timeframe. Yahoo for code!

Jul. 15, 2011 at 4:36am
I really like the “Store Hours” display on the Starbucks app. Dynamically sorts the days based on what day it is today.

I really like the “Store Hours” display on the Starbucks app. Dynamically sorts the days based on what day it is today.

Jul. 13, 2011 at 9:27am
“
Very excited that Charity Chirpa is the “Wildcard” category winner in the Donors Choose Hacking Education contest. http://t11.me/OZ6-7S
— Twitter
Jun. 28, 2011 at 8:28am
“
Submitted my entry for the Hacking Education contest. If you like helping teachers and kids, I think you’ll dig it: http://charitychirpa.com
— Twitter
May. 13, 2011 at 9:27am
“
Results are in for the O’Reilly/Fluidinfo API competition…pretty excited about being first. :) http://goo.gl/Xf6UT
— Twitter
Apr. 8, 2011 at 5:06pm
My Friday Happy Hour

My Friday Happy Hour

Mar. 23, 2011 at 12:10pm
“
I trust my ability to write code far more than my ability to predict the future.
—

Me

Although I seriously doubt I’m the first person to say this, I think it succinctly describes how I feel about developing features and architecture before they are needed.

Alternate working version: I trust my ability to use code to solve a problem in the future far more than my ability to predict what that future problem will actually be.