Development

Sharpening The Saw – Bashing Your Workflow

Typing. As a developer you do a ton of it day in and day out. However, most typing is in service of menial tasks that you repeat several times throughout the day. You should be focused on solving problems, not remembering the API to various command line applications or boilerplate language idioms. Wouldn't it be great if you could automate those tasks? The good news is that nearly 100% of the typing you do is on a computer, which by some kind of miracle is able to be um… programmed. In this post, I'll share some of my favorite ways to stop doing grunt work and focus on solving client problems.

JavaScript with Nothing to Hide

Since the current trend of "fat-client" web applications, JavaScript has forced it's way into the toolbox of many developers. If you're like most people, you cobble together scripts you need based on examples you find on the internet. After all, it looks a lot like that language you've used day in and day out for the last 15 years so how hard could it be? Unfortunately, most of the examples on the internet aren't very exemplary. It's time we had a candid chat about anonymous functions.

Backbone.js with a Spine – Part 1: The App Object

I'm at the tail end of a project where we used a non-trivial amount of the lovely Backbone.js framework. While the documentation is really pretty good, I think you're left with quite a bit of freedom on how to design your application. This may cause some struggles with regard to the architecture and consistency of your system.

Automatic Scopes and Indexing Hstore

It's been a while since I blogged about Single Table Inheritance. You may wonder how that's been working out for me? Well, it's been fantastic! We currently have 7 subclasses each with their own attributes. On boarding our new dev was smooth (read, we weren't too clever) and performance has been great. It's the most heavily used table in our database loading 100s per page with automatic scrolling and refreshing and cocktail onions, etc… We did have a couple additions over the months with and I'd like to share those with you.

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