January 2012
1 post
Scaling Back
I played 28 video games in 2010.
I played 27 video games in 2011.
I’m scaling back in 2012 and limiting myself to playing 10 video games. These are the video games I’ll be playing in 2012.
Syndicate (XBOX) Mass Effect 3 (XBOX) Prototype 2 (XBOX) Borderlands 2 (XBOX) Assassin’s Creed III (XBOX) BioShock Infinite (XBOX) Grand Theft Auto V (XBOX) The Last Guardian (PS3) ...
December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
2011 Game of the Year
My 2011 Game of the Year goes to Dead Space 2. It was a tough choice to come up with a single video game that stood out among the many video games I played this year*. However, Dead Space 2 was a thrill ride that never let up from beginning to end.
Whenever I talked with people about Dead Space 2, I was usually met with, “I still haven’t finished the first Dead Space. It was too...
3 tags
rake stats
rake stats is one of those less-oft used tasks when developing Rails applications, but it does provide a good breakdown of some code statistics. You’ll get total lines, lines of code, # of classes, # of methods, methods per class, lines of code per method and some ratios.
Here’s a breakdown of one project at work:
...
2 tags
I Am Code and Coffee and So Can You
I’ve started doing code and coffee sessions around my area, the “Capital District” of NY (Albany, Troy, and Saratoga Springs). They’re informal gatherings where technology-minded folks can get together to share code or ideas. So, some initial thoughts after having done a number of sessions:
Hold them once a week. It’s good to get a regular rhythm going. If you miss a...
2 tags
Ruby and Rails Version Application Progression
I did a quick assessment of our applications at work to look at the Ruby and Rails versions that we have running in production.
Number of applications running under Ruby … :
1.8.7: 1
1.9.2: 0
1.9.3: 13
All versions of Ruby are MRI.
Number of applications running under Rails … :
2.x: 1
3.0.x: 10
3.1.x: 3
Overall I think that’s pretty good. Our applications serve...
2 tags
Internal Consistency
I recently started using Sinatra again for a few projects and found that my approach to developing these projects had changed significantly in such a short period of time (a couple of days). Looking at the difference between 2 significant projects, I wanted to enumerate what I found to be my “best practices”.
Use a “self-documenting” application name. I see a lot of...
September 2011
4 posts
Solid
What makes an API or a library “solid”?
Logical?
Documented?
Tested?
Performant?
Maintained?
All of the above? Some of the above? None of the above?
3 tags
Unbalanced
It’s 2011.
Scenario:
I need data from your web service.
In order to retrieve said data, I have to call another web service from you that returns the most appropriately load-balanced URL from which to retrieve data.
I now call the appropriately load-balanced URL at the time of my first request to get the data I need from your web service.
Problems:
2 HTTP requests > 1 HTTP request to...
3 tags
Rhetorical Question
If someone from thoughtbot asks if you’re willing to write a test (or tests) for a patch, that is a rhetorical question. Case and point, a pull request I opened on their airbrake project: https://github.com/thoughtbot/airbrake/pull/1 - Use the Capistrano logger for great justice.
It started off as an innocuous request to change the use of puts in a Capistrano task to use the Capistrano...
2 tags
first.rb
The first Ruby I ever wrote was in December 2005. It was akismet.rb, a small class for interacting with the Akismet service. My post to the spam-stopper mailing list can be found here. I personally never did anything with the class and I didn’t touch Ruby again for another 3 years until I started working at Agora Games. However, if you google for akismet.rb, you’ll see it took on a...
August 2011
1 post
How I Celebrated Whyday 2011
My contributions on Whyday this year aren’t poignant. It was just nice to set aside some of those “I should do that at some point” tasks. I celebrated a day early because I had family visiting on the actual day, August 19th, 2011.
I ran all the test suites for all of my actively maintained gems with the -W option to enable warnings and updated my code to correct the warnings. I...