Mark etc.

A great decade...

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 11:01:38 -0600

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.

Attention email marketers. This is the interface I use to...

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:31:44 -0600

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.

ruby_chopped

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 16:13:17 -0500

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:

I had never built a gem with an accompanying command line executable. Good learning there. (And even more through the pull requests…)
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.
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!

SeedMe - Creating a data seed file from your Rails development database

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:40:13 -0500

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!

I really like the “Store Hours” display on the...

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 04:36:19 -0500

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

"Very excited that Charity Chirpa is the “Wildcard” category winner in the Donors Choose..."

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:27:00 -0500

“Very excited that Charity Chirpa is the “Wildcard” category winner in the Donors Choose Hacking Education contest. http://t11.me/OZ6-7S”

- Twitter

"Submitted my entry for the Hacking Education contest. If you like helping teachers and kids, I think..."

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:28:00 -0500

“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

"Results are in for the O’Reilly/Fluidinfo API competition…pretty excited about being..."

Fri, 13 May 2011 09:27:00 -0500

“Results are in for the O’Reilly/Fluidinfo API competition…pretty excited about being first. :) http://goo.gl/Xf6UT”

- Twitter

My Friday Happy Hour

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:06:52 -0500

My Friday Happy Hour

"I trust my ability to write code far more than my ability to predict the future."

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:10:00 -0500

“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.

At the DPS for a way overdue license renewal. Imagine, I used to have to talk to the people around...

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 09:28:00 -0600

At the DPS for a way overdue license renewal. Imagine, I used to have to talk to the people around me to pass the time.

A screenshot of my work computer today. Background My Uncle...

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:44:00 -0600

A screenshot of my work computer today.

Background

My Uncle Curtis has been battling kidney cancer for almost a year now. Today I got a call with information that, after a very rough weekend, the doctors are pretty concerned and that things might be getting bad quickly.

Before that call and the quick google searches that followed, I was brushing up on a presentation I’m doing at work today about virtual gaming and virtual goods.

And at some point I looked at my screen and this is what I saw.

I think illustrates my working theory that work/life balance is unrealistic and honestly isn’t a goal worth pursuing. My life is intertwined and pieces of it cannot be separated out and weighed against each other.

I want my life to be an orchestra of roles, commitments, and experiences that not only play together in harmony, but also allow for solos, movements, and other cool musical terms that I don’t have in my vocabulary.

"Specs are fine, but they take two seconds, and opinions, if they’re based on experience, are more..."

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:06:00 -0600

“Specs are fine, but they take two seconds, and opinions, if they’re based on experience, are more interesting. If you know about something, you have an opinion about it.”

- Grant Petersen owner of Rivendell, a speciality bike shop. Featured on the Signal vs. Noise blog.

While all the girls were taking a nap this morning, I had some...

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:28:47 -0600

While all the girls were taking a nap this morning, I had some time to turn our blueberries into muffins.

The recipe is from Alton Brown’s Good Eats volume 2, which was recently given to me.

Our newest addition: Lauren.

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:50:35 -0600

Our newest addition: Lauren.

Really like how the 37signals forum uses the application icons...

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:18:48 -0600

Really like how the 37signals forum uses the application icons as sort of a profile karma/status.

RSpec Views: Looking for tags with certain onclick attributes

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:50:26 -0500

Thanks to agile on #dallas.rb for helping me get to this. A great resource for all things tag and attribute related in regards to rails http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/HTML/Selector.html

  
describe "/questions/show that logged in user is not monitoring" do
  it_should_behave_like "/questions/show"
  
  it "should have a link to start monitoring" do
    response.should have_tag('a#monitor_link')
    onclick = "new Ajax.Request('/questions/#{@question.id}/monitored_by/#{@current_user.id}',
                       {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, method:'post'});
                       return false;"
    response.should have_tag("a#monitor_link[onclick=\"#{onclick}\"]")
  end
  
end

RSpec Logged In Helper

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:24:57 -0500

This is what I’m using to help out with actions and views that require a logged in user

spec_helper.rb
  
module LoggedInHelper
  def mock_globals
    @current_user = mock_model(User, :id => 1)
  end
end

describe "Logged In Action", :shared => true do
  include LoggedInHelper
  
  before(:each) do
    mock_globals
    
    controller.stub!(:current_user).and_return(@current_user)
  end
end

describe "Logged In View", :shared => true do 
  include LoggedInHelper
  
  before(:each) do
    mock_globals
    
    template.stub!(:current_user).and_return(@current_user)
    template.stub!(:logged_in?).and_return(true)
  end
end

profiles_controller_spec.rb
  
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'

describe QuestionMonitorsController do
  it_should_behave_like "Logged In Action"

  #your specs here
end

show.html.erb_spec.rb
  
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spec_helper'

describe "/profiles/show" do
  it_should_behave_like "Logged In View"

  #your specs here
end

Using flash for javascript messages

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:01:07 -0500

Using flash[:notice] doesn’t work so well with AJAX calls. Adding a “js_notice” key to flash has helped me in several places.

  
    respond_to do |format|
      if @question_monitor.save
        format.js {  
          flash[:js_notice] = "You will now be alerted to any new activity on this question."
        }
      else
        format.js {
          flash[:js_notice] = "There was a problem in trying to monitor this question"
        }
      end
    end

BarCampBankSeattle Day 2 Recap

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:47:00 -0500

Day 2…wow…what a day. Started with a great session on “banker to banker collaboration”:http://barcampbankseattle.pbwiki.com/Day2Session1D and ended with a monumental whiteboard of promise and hope. Sound a little dramatic…maybe…but then again maybe not. The amount of space it is taking up in my mind can only be explained by something that truly is revolutionary.

Even with the picture of that whiteboard almost tattooed in my mind, the thing that sticks with me the most from Day 2, is Jesse’s unwillingness to let the rest of us settle for the Jesse Robbins solution. There were several times in our afternoon discussion where I could almost feel the room waiting to let Jesse take this project and run all the way with it, filling us in where appropriate. However, much to Jesse’s credit, that was not the path that was taken, nor was it the path that was needed. What needed to happen was a room full people talking to a whiteboard, venting frustrations and forging solutions.

And now we sit with an even greater task ahead, continuing forward without sitting in the same room and staring at each other until someone speaks. I am excited about the road ahead, not just for the promise of an open source solution to an industry issue, but also for the collaboration that will occur between bright people and experimentation of the technologies that will best facilitate this conversation.