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 [...]
I released my first production Rails application, hugagoth.com, last night.
I first started playing with Rails over 2 years ago and it has taken me until now to take an app through from conception to initial deployment. And an interesting journey it has been.
When I first started investigating Rails I had never used a web framework [...]
Last month Giles Bowkett in the trawls of his hypergraphia wrote a post on Nano-Apps, quirky one page apps which serve up a piece of trivia or answer a question like is George W. Bush still president?
Previously I had put together hometi.me, a little AJAX-y app to let me know how much longer I had [...]
To date, a lot of interesting applications have been built on top of the Twitter service with new apps being released almost daily, each one more ingenious than the last.
In my spare time I’ve been tinkering with Ruby, my motivation being to learn something new and to see if Ruby lives up the hype that [...]