Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category

RailsConf Reflections

Released May 24th, 2011

Today, I’m feeling mostly recovered from my first ever RailsConf, so I thought I would take some time to reflect on what I learned there, and share it with you, my dear reader. So, here we go, in no particular order…

CoffeeScript is happening…

…whether you like it or not. Personally, I’m psyched — it looks like it solves a lot of the annoyances I’ve had with Javascript syntax, and I got a sweet deal on CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development during the conference, which I hope to put to good use starting this week.

The Rails Community is Awesome

My wife’s response after she read my tweets upon my return:

“Just wondered, who is this guy? Dinner anyone? Share a cab? You became an extrovert on your mothership.”

It’s true, I did. It’s weird. I’ve never been to Baltimore before (save time spent between flights at BWI), but among my fellow Rails coders, I’ve never felt more “at home.”

As I thought about all of the people I finally got to thank in person for all they’ve done to make my time in the Rails community more enjoyable, it really drove home what an awesome community we have. It’s easy to lose sight of this while working away in Louisville, my little corner of Kentucky.

Aside from this, getting a chance to put a real face to a name, make and receive thank-yous for all the hard work we put in on Rails patches, plugins, and the like, has the effect of re-energizing a developer. I’d go on and list all of the awesome people I got to meet in person here, but I think it’d just make @casron more jealous.

I would like to say, however, that Emilio Tagua (@miloops) has got to be one of the friendliest guys I’ve ever met. I’d hoped to catch up with him to thank him for helping me get commits added to ARel back in the 1.x days that were needed for MetaSearch and MetaWhere. Instead, he ended up two seats over from me at Ignite, noticed I was hacking on a Squeel bug, and introduced himself first. Every time I saw him during the remainder of the conference, he had a smile and a kind word. Just an all-around great guy to have met.

PostgreSQL is awesome, too!

Now, I should have known this. I had started out using MySQL many years ago, when it had solid speed advantages over PostgreSQL, but far fewer features. Somewhere along the line, that balance shifted, but I stuck with MySQL due to familiarity. Nick Gauthier’s KnowSQL presentation has made a believer out of me. I’ll be using PostgreSQL as my RDBMS of choice from here on, and making sure that Squeel works as well as possible with it, too.

The Fundamentals are ALWAYS Relevant

There were tons of talks on design patterns, best practices, and so on, and even as long as I’ve been doing this whole coding thing, there are plenty of areas in which I can improve. In particular, Avdi Grimm’s talk, Confident Code, José Valim’s talk about the design principles behind the Rails 3 refactoring, and the talk on Building Bulletproof Views by John Athayde and Bruce Williams all challenged me to elevate my game in these areas.

HTML5 is sooooo much more than semantic tags

LocalStorage, audio, video, canvas drawing, web sockets, web workers — this stuff is all crazy cool and I can’t wait until more browsers support it. Mike Subelsky’s HTML5 tutorial was a real eye-opener.

That’s about it, for now. What were some of your takeaways from RailsConf this year?

Have fun with celebt.ag

Released March 20th, 2011

celebtag screenshotMost of us have been starstruck at one time or another–you see a celeb in real life, and you may think, ‘Where have I seen this person before?’ Then suddenly, it clicks–OMG, that’s so-and-so! Snap a photo on your mobile phone, as modern-day voyeurs do, and share your brush with fame using celebt.ag.

What’s celebt.ag, you ask? It’s a mobile-friendly website that combs Twitter to collect photos of celebs and let’s you see who’s been seen. We wanted to make it super simple – no commitment, no log in or username to remember – or forget, no hassle. Simple fun in three steps:

  1. Snap a photo of a celeb
  2. Upload your photo to twitpic, yfrog, tweetphoto or ow.ly
  3. Tweet about your pic and use the hashtag #celebtag in your tweet, and see your photo appear on the site.

We developed celebt.ag, as a fun, whimsical way to explore and interact with the mobile web. We also explored the use of responsive design to format the layout of the site for use on nearly any browser with one set of code. See who the top celebs are, who the top spotters are and where you fit in the picture.

uncard.me arrives in Austin for SXSWi

Released March 9th, 2011

uncard screenshotsuncard.me is a web-based alternative to app-based contact sharing solutions that lets you control how much or how little information to share. Create as many uncards as you want for different purposes and share them with QR code-enabled smartphone users. uncard.me is not another app or social network, it’s simply a fast way for people to connect, on the go, from any smartphone.

The concept came about as senior architect, Ernie Miller and creative director Todd Budnikas were planning for SXSW. “What we need is a way to share just our contact info, and nothing more. Without requiring us to carry stacks of business cards, or make goofy hand gestures with everyone we bump into, like we’re back in college again,” said Miller, “We looked, but we couldn’t find that solution. So we decided to build it.”

We hope you find this application as useful as we do. If you have any suggestions or comments please reach out to us on Twitter.

DNA is Good

Released March 1st, 2011
Screen capture of the Intrepid Bioinformatics website.

Screen capture of the Intrepid Bioinformatics website.

Ok, bad paraphrasing aside, for one moment, put on your best “Gordon Gekko” suit, and loosely consider this:

In finance, a portfolio is a collection of investments held by an institution or an individual. Holding a portfolio is a part of an investment and risk-limiting strategy called diversification – by owning several assets, or “things with value”, certain types of risk can be reduced. In building up an investment portfolio, a financial institution will typically conduct investment analysis, while a private individual may make use of a financial advisor/institution’s portfolio management services.

Now ask yourself this – what if there were a way to do this with, oh I don’t know: your genetic data? Enter Intrepid Bioinformatics.

Intrepid’s founders had a vision, one of a heterogenous genetic data management platform that would allow researchers to store, compare, and contextualize genetic trends, as well as purchase reagents and consumables, all in one place. With a newly-designed identity by Katie Bush Design, Inc. in hand, Intrepid and their team came to Mission Data looking to take this concept out of the futuristic conversational realm and bring it into the “now”.

What Does It Do?

A “software-as-a-service” platform allows genetic researchers to compare similar data sets from thousands of samples side-by-side. With Intrepid, a researcher can begin to quickly identify trends in entire populations which will have the potential to quickly advance discoveries in the medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural biotechnology industries. From free trials to rich-access subscriber plans, users are presented with an impressive load of features right out of the gate – multiple upload options, data downloading, user tutorials, and active collaboration between other community members of your choice, to name a few.

Who’s Using It?

Intrepid appeals to the genetic research community in two sectors: human genome research and animal (specifically, bovine) research. The markets for these two segments are vastly different, and the audience can be further segmented into researchers working for larger companies/governments/universities vs. researchers in small, relatively unfunded labs.

Take, for example, a cattle farmer. He or she obviously has a vested interest in ensuring that their clients are receiving the best product possible, be it milk, beef, etc. By using Intrepid’s services, they can access a wealth of genetic data that will help them determine which lines of cattle are best suited for those assorted purposes. And, which lines they might want to avoid because of a predilection for disease.

That’s not to say those are the only audience contingents that Intrepid is looking to pull into their community. On the contrary, a day on the horizon can be seen in which members of the public can look to utilize Intrepid Bioinformatics’ services like a digital genetic bank, safely and securely storing their data with constant and “at-will” access.

Our team at Mission Data constantly look to push and redefine the boundaries of what is thought possible and conventional in the realm of the web. And, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that if we can eliminate boundaries and make the ideas of the future happen while partnering with great clients, then the ride is made all the better. This was certainly the case here.

To further paraphrase Gordon Gekko: “It’s all about the ‘now’, kid. The rest is just conversation.”

Programming Languages Are Slow

Released October 15th, 2010

Moore's LawI was chatting with a friend of mine who’s been working toward getting his company to consider a migration to Ruby on Rails. It’s interesting to me, because they’ve been using frameworks that are heavily influenced by Rails, but the developers there are resistant to moving to the real deal. They’ve started to lean away from PHP and toward Java lately, so naturally I suggested they take a look at JRuby, which provides all the awesome of Ruby but runs on the JVM, thereby keeping the suits happy. The  response from one of his co-workers when he passed on my suggestion? “Ruby was (and is) terribly slow.” Argh. This, again? I tweeted my response:

If your best argument against using Ruby is a perception that it’s slow, a reminder: Moore’s Law is on our side. :)

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MetaSearch

Released September 17th, 2010

Most people know we churn out a good many Rails-based websites. Now one of our own, Ernie Miller, is starting to make waves with his object-based searching gem, MetaSearch. For his efforts, Ernie received a mention on the Ruby5 podcast. Go listen to the podcast, then go check out MetaSearch!

Online Vs Offline Applications: Everything old is new again

Released March 28th, 2007

Everyone has probably noticed this already but the old is new again cycle for “online” desktop apps has been shortening at a rapid pace. Everywhere you turn you see people talking about offline and online apps and what should be online vs offline. If you take your time machine back you would see something like the following timeline:

  • 1970s 3270
  • 1980s X terminal
  • 1990s Java applets
  • 2000 Flash
  • 2005 Ajax

Up until about 2000 it was taking 10 years to cycle from “we want everything on our desktop” to “we want everything on the server”. Now the cycle seems to have sped up to every year and then to constant. A couple recent examples of new faces on this old idea are Adobe’s Apollo and Joyent’s Slingshot.

Fundamentally not much has changed from the 1970s. The goal is to centralize computing resources into one place (in the simple view of things) and make issues like software deployment easier.The main difference now is that the industry has come to the point where there isn’t any turning back and everyone has bought on to the need and usefulness of online apps. The main sticking point seems to be finding a way to resolve issues that come up from users being disconnected from time to time. I’ll bet that one won’t be fully resolved until you have connectivity anywhere and everywhere you go.

Hibernate and your Getters and Setters

Released March 11th, 2007

When you’re using Hibernate and are mapping to properties, keep your getters and setters as simple and self-contained as possible. The receiver being initialized may not have any other properties set, and the value being passed may not be fully initialized yet, either.

If you don’t respect these two possibilities, then you will get bit in the butt alot, when you least expect it. To be fair, these situations can happen whether you’re using Hibernate or not, but when we first started using the framework we made lots of assumptions.

Here is a completely ridiculous example that violates the above restrictions:
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Using the Hibernate API to Inspect Mapped Classes

Released August 2nd, 2006

For my current project we needed to audit the property setters Hibernate was using on our objects to make sure that any logic in them was not overly state dependent. More about this issue in Hibernate is available here. We have fairly rich object models, and a lot of methods, including setters, are never used by Hibernate. We wanted a report of the setters actually used by Hibernate to limit the amount of code we had to examine.

The Hibernate API allows you a lot of access to its configuration object model, and this is ideal for finding out how Hibernate is interacting with your code. I wrote a small class to do this inspection. The method below is run after a Hibernate Configuration object named creatively as “configuration” has been built with mapping files:

public Map findSetters() throws MappingException
{
  Map classToSetters = new HashMap();
  Iterator classMappingIterator =   configuration.getClassMappings();

  while(classMappingIterator.hasNext())
  {
    PersistentClass persistentClass = (PersistentClass)classMappingIterator.next();
    Class mappedClass = persistentClass.getMappedClass();
    Iterator propertyIt = persistentClass.getPropertyIterator();
    List classSetters = new LinkedList();

    classToSetters.put(mappedClass, classSetters);

    while(propertyIt.hasNext())
    {
      Property property = (Property)propertyIt.next();
      Setter setter = property.getSetter(mappedClass);

      classSetters.add(setter.getMethodName());
    }
  }
  return classToSetters;
}

I have uploaded a Java project that contains the full HibernateInspector class, as well as some sample classes and mappings. Un-tar it, and run

ant -Dhibernate.home="path to hibernate 3" 

to build and run the example.

Slides for “You’ll Be Seeing Ruby”

Released May 17th, 2006

The slides for the presentation are finally available, along with a zipfile, on the Presentation: You’ll Be Seeing Ruby page.

It’s been a month now since our last performance, but it all comes back every time I look at the slides.