Last year I created a nano-app which attempted to answer the question, is it raining in Belfast?
I was never completely pleased with it but the objective was to get something done and get it done fast, which was achieved.
This weekend I’ve been tinkering with another project and hit a bit of a stumbling block getting [...]
Some time ago DW and myself had an enthusiastic conversation about logging various aspects of our electronic lives: emails sent and received, RSS feeds read, incoming and outgoing phone calls, the list goes on.
At that time I’d already started tinkering with apps to track my efforts in the gym and changes in my bodyweight, I’ve [...]
The past while I’ve been busy providing technical consultancy to BT and haven’t had much drive to work on anything on my own time. The itch has returned the past couple of weeks though so I thought I’d see what I’ve been missing in the Rails world and in what better way than getting a [...]
I’ve just released the latest iteration of hometi.me, a little nano-app I’ve mentioned before.
Deliberate Practice
It’s only a trivial app but I’ve a bit of free time before the start of a contract so I thought it would be good practice to redevelop it, a task I’d been ignoring for a long time.
Goodbye CakePHP, Hello Sinatra
The [...]
Last month, at the inaugural Super Happy Dev Castle, my buddy Dave Rice told me about a project he was working on involving node.js, an event-based I/O system for Javascript.
Javascript outside of the browser?
This concept seemed almost ridiculous to me at that time but I thought it was worth a look and cobbled together a [...]
I was recently developing a project at work which at the beginning didn’t need a database. However, Cake was still testing the database connection and issuing a warning as a result when it couldn’t connect. My solution was to create a dummy datasource which silenced the warnings and allowed me to get on with the [...]
I recently released the latest entry in my series of nano-apps.
As with my previous efforts, istrending.com serves serves no real purpose other than as an act of deliberate practice: going through the process of coming up with an idea, writing code, registering domain names, setting up Cron jobs and configuring deployment systems to get it [...]
At the moment I’m in between paid work and have been using my time to generally enjoy life but to also improve my skills. I’m all about the skills.
As an act of deliberate practice to hone my skills with web-application development and to deepen my understanding of the Rails framework I’ve been adding to my [...]
Well, it only took me 2 and a half years but I finally used Rails to develop a catalogue for my DVD collection.
The catalogue loosely fits in with my series of nano-apps and is hosted on movies.stevenwilkin.com. The code is publicly available on GitHub for anyone who’s interested.
All’s left now is to actually use the [...]
In my last post I considered transforming stevenwilkin.com into a Sinatra app.
Well, I did it, although I’m only mentioning it now.
Not only was this my first experience with Sinatra but I also decided to try using HAML for the markup and Blueprint CSS to help with the styling. If I’m going to play with a [...]