Johnathon

Wright

One of the things I appreciate about good design is the way two complex problems can be solved more elegantly together than separately. A great example of this is "reCAPTCHA":http://www.recaptcha.net . It prevents bots from submitting forms _and_ helps "digitize books, newspapers, and old time radio shows" ... they've used crowd-sourcing to...

I broke the build today by using an ActiveRecord model in my routes file: --- ruby dynamic_paths = Model.all.map(&:path) dynamic_paths.each do |path| map.connect path, :controller => 'feed', :action => 'show', :format => 'xml' end --- I wouldn't have expected this to be a problem, and it worked immediately, so I went...

Git's documentation is pretty lacking. I was looking for information about git's tags and found a fantastic explaination-by-demonstration at RockStarProgrammer.org (not sure how they got what should have been my domain.) "Git Tag does wrong thing by default":http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/oct/16/git-tag-does-wrong-thing-default/...

I recently saw this exception: ** /config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/rails/gem_dependency.rb:101:in `specification':Gem::Exception: can't activate , already activated *gem_name* This exception seemed to be the result of several problems intermingling: 1. rake gems:install wouldn't work because the config.gem statements were in...

I'll admit upfront that this is such a small compliment it may not be worth a post... but small compliments are still nice to receive. Thanks to all my clients for good feedback and interesting work. !http://www.odesk.com/community/system/files/webdevelop_s.png! I continue to think that, while being productive is important, frequent,...

A few days ago, someone on the business side of our project created a task in the system with a single sentence: Add Flash to front page. This requirement is, in many ways, the exact opposite of useful. Here are some concerns: * What is the business value? * What is the audience? * What will it do? * There is no predefined "done." * How big...

On a recent project, the tech-savvy client told me we would be using xids. These are different from regular IDs in that they are a unique identifier across the domain. So, if you create a user with the ID 1000, then you create a ticket, it would have the id 1001, and then when you created some other object, it would have the id 1002. His...

"Anti-If Campaign":http://www.antiifcampaign.com/ "Avoid dangerous IFs and use Object Oriented Principles to build a code that is flexible, changeable and easily testable, and will get rid of a lot of headaches and weekends spent debugging!" I don't necessarily agree that if statements are _dangerous_. Actually, having read what seems to be...