As a (mainly) Rails developer, I’m pretty accustomed to the need for secret keeping within a server-based application, and how it gets done (typically, config.yml’s and/or ENV variables). Getting into Android though, I’ve had the need to integrate with Parse to retrieve some simple data that I don’t want to manage a data service for. Since I want to open...
I’m a minimalist. When it comes to web design, I value white space, typography and function. People come to your site for the writing, which is why a focus on these elements will almost always result in a good user experience. Adding non-essential elements to a page reduces signal and creates noise. — Sam Solomon
Very much inline with how I feel about design and UX in general.
This morning, I created a new repository on Github called toolkit. I’m using it to keep track of the tools I use every day, in order to benefit others who are interested in how I work, and for my own benefit, to be able to easily refer to documentation, source code and links for tools that may be useful for...
As a Rails developer, you’ll almost certainly need to do some unobtrusive Javascript in your applications - in fact, if you use Rails’ jquery-ujs gem, it’s almost encouraged! Without writing any script yourself at all, you can have a form button that disables itself with a message while the form is submitted by simply constructing your button like so: <%=...
Ransack is one of my go-to Rubygems, especially for admin applications. It provides a really simple interface to building up complex filtering and ‘searching’ of many records. Check out the README for more information about how it all works - this post covers a specific problem case of Ransack. In Rails, we are often subtely educated that the ID of...
This Rails helper allows simple parsing of params that have originated from ActionView’s date_select helper method into a Date or DateTime object in a consistent and clean way.
Last Friday, I headed off to Railscamp NZ with one guy from work, 8 cans of V, and a bag of carrots (my snack food of choice). Today it’s Wednesday, I’ve still got 8 cans of V, a few less carrots, one open-source application that I’m actually happy with (and Travis CI and CodeClimate say is pretty well put together),...
As a web developer, I’ve got a pretty good pick of websites - I know what companies are prepared to stick with tried and tested technologies, and combine it with just enough new stuff to make browsing their site pleasant and easy to do. Every now and then though, I’m forced out of my comfort zone, and need to find...
It’s not at all uncommon to be asked by a client “So, I’d really like to be able to edit that bit of the page just there - can we do that?”. The answer, of course, is yes, but managing content has no end of complexities. Just one of these many is publishing - that is, controlling content, where it...
On the Spot is a pet project that I tend to develop with bleeding-edge features in mind - something a bit more volatile than Latter, which is used heavily enough to justify a more cautious development process. In this post, I’m going to detail how I added HTML5 notifications to On the Spot, the upsides and downsides, and the Coffeescript...