WhatCodeCraves

Resque Cheatsheet

Coded and used by the Github team, Resque is a Ruby queue for processing background jobs built on top of Redis. So far, I'm really enjoying the simple setup and simple API. The documentation gives a lot of good background information, and it's been working well overall. Follow the jump for a day-to-day usage reference.

Read more

New Beginnings: Starting with Intridea

Three weeks ago, I started as a full time software developer at Intridea. It's been an absolute blast so far, but it happened so quickly that I'm still somewhat dazed at how I got here. Just two month ago, I was in Israel and Egypt visiting Wendy and working on Outspokes, and now I'm working with energetic and talented individuals; all of whom I've never seen in real life before, but many of whom I've heard of in the Ruby community.

Read more

Getting Around in MongoDB

I started working with MongoDB a few days ago. To oversimplify, think of Mongo as a really big and fast hash that gets saved to disk. It lets you query, retrieve, and manipulate data in Javascript and JSON. I had a ton of work to do, so I didn't get a chance to explore the technology as much as I would've liked. Today, after getting a solid night's sleep, I got a chance to experiment more. Read on to get some quick tips about writing Mongo queries and generating reports from the Mongo shell.

Read more

Email Delivery for Webapps

Delivering email is easy. Having that email actually get received is freaking hard. In this era rife with spammers, if you don't jump through several hoops of verifying yourself, your messages will be automatically marked as spam during transit, and never see the light of an inbox. I didn't realize how tricky this was when I first started sending out email for Outspokes, but when our account activation and notification emails were always being delivered to the spam folder, I dug deeper and learned quite a lot. Follow the jump to save your future emails.

Read more

Beerpad Hackathon: Hosting with Heroku

When I started planning out Beerpad, I wanted to focus on fun beer ideas. I'm perfectly capable of setting up an environment for a Rails application to run in, but I didn't want to waste a morning doing a bunch of chores and have nothing but a "Hello World" page to show for it. Once I had my designs, I wanted to prototype the juicy real features right away. Enter Heroku. Heroku is a service for hosting Ruby webapps. I've been interested in the service since I saw Adam Wiggins demo it at a SVC Ruby Meetup. Heroku is a one-stop serivce for starting a database-backed, Rack compatible, Ruby webapp. They use git to version control your code, Thin to serve your traffic, and Postgresql to store your data. They also have add-ons that webapps may find useful. I've been looking for an excuse to play with the service, and Beerpad fit the bill perfectly. Follow the jump for my experiences.

Read more

About

My name is Jerry and I'm an optimistic programmer living and working in the Bay Area. I'm a co-founder of Outspokes, a widget that lives on your site and helps you collaborate with your team and clients on tasks, designs, and bugs.

I enjoy geeking out and programming in my free time. Non-technically, I'd like to someday be surrounded by both crappy cars and exotic cars, and run my own cafe that turns into a brewpub at night. In the meantime, this tech diary serves to remind myself of my goals.