Last week I gave a short talk at BelfastJS outlining WebSockets: what they are, how you use them, examples, warnings and alternatives. That should cover the basics I think.
A few months ago I spoke at BelfastRuby and it was good again to be sharing some knowledge with a bunch of people enthusiastic about technology and [...]
It has become common practice these days to use tools like RVM and Bundler to manage a project’s dependencies. When these pacakages are in place, getting up to speed with another project is a breeze.
The Pain
But how about installing these tools themselves? How about other dependant pieces of software such as databases and the like? [...]
About 9 hours ago I dandered down the road to see what was happening at the FlackNite event being hosted in Farset Labs.
When I finally got myself settled down with network access and a cup of coffee and said hello to everyone it seemed I was the only one without a project to work on. [...]
Tonight I gave an introductory talk about Sinatra at the second meetup of BelfastRuby.
The Converser platform I’ve been building this last while uses a lot of Sinatra so when I was asked to give a talk about using Ruby to develop web apps without Rails it wasn’t hard to think of a subject.
This was my [...]
I’ve often joked about putting together an app to track my coffee consumption, such is my reputation for consuming the black goodness. Like a lot of my other personal projects, the idea had a prolonged gestation period and was finally born through a welcome spark of motivation.
Crafting fine web APIs
Over the past 6 months [...]
I was on-site with Vigill one day before Christmas and I mentioned to Oisin an idea I had for an app.
I was sick of having endless tabs open in Chrome, hogging memory, each one some seeming important enough at the time that I read it but now just a contextless enigma.
If I at least knew [...]
Quite often I feel the need to learn something new for the sake of learning something new. Covey aficionados would know this as sharpening the saw.
I usually struggle deciding upon something however as there are so many areas to choose from in the software world and it isn’t everyday I feel drawn enough to something [...]
After last week’s great Xcake meet I felt a fresh surge to take on new challenges and bend some less-familiar pieces of technology to my will.
Motivation
The first product of this enthusiasm was a prototype web app built to get a bit more experience with Python and Google App Engine. A few days later it got [...]
Background
For a long time now whenever I’m on the search for something interesting to work on that could potentially be of value to myself and others my attention is brought to topics like machine learning, data mining and natural language processing.
These are all areas within computer science which are not particularly easy and have a [...]
I think I first heard the term “Rack-app” when I started using Heroku to host a couple of projects. I didn’t know an awful lot about Rack but I did know that it helped a great deal when it came to getting my Rails and Sinatra apps off my workstation and onto the web.
Tonight I [...]