Cantina folks shared their favorite tools from post-it notes to Emacs. Tried and true to bleeding edge, here are some of our favorite things. Editors Emacs is ever popular if your fingers can bend in strange and interesting ways. vi (or vim) keeps the flame war with Emacs burning. screen and tmux make life in [...]
Read Moreifttt.com (IF This Then That) is a service allowing automation of interaction between your other services. You create rules (called “tasks” and “recipes”) to be run automatically when a certain condition is true. For instance, each time a new post is made on your blog make a new tweet and post Facebook and Linked In status [...]
Read MoreFor the past couple months I’ve been using a standing desk a few times a week. What’s a standing desk? Well, it’s a desk. Except higher. And you stand at it instead of sitting. Why would you do such a thing? In short, to be healthier and feel better: You may have seen some of [...]
Read MoreWell, I hope so anyway. CoffeeScript is a language based on JavaScript with a simplified the syntax that more resembles languages like Ruby or Python. This make it more useful as a software engineering tool as well as making it much more fun to use. In addition, it is JavaScript. And herein lies the hope. [...]
Read MoreThis article was recently dug up by our very own Chris Lamothe and directs some pointed criticism at frameworks. The post is still amusing even though it is now six years old. The article is still relevant and I think acts as a measure and challenge to developers as to how far (or not far) [...]
Read MoreA while back I had the opportunity to use RightScale during the development of a system that processed very large amounts of web analytics data. RightScale is a layer on top of Amazon AWS that, among other things, allows you to define roles for each type of server that you need. These roles are used [...]
Read MoreI have an adverse reaction to retail stores, which is strange for me to say considering how long I’ve worked in retail, but as a customer, I have very visceral reactions to almost any store where someone walks up to me at random and asks me if I need any help. Surely I do need [...]
Read MoreIf you’re at all involved in the gaming community, you’ve probably caught wind of Sony’s latest fiasco, but in case you aren’t up to speed, the Playstation Network, Sony’s online component to their console ecosphere, has been down for seven days and counting. Initial reports began to circulate, purely on speculation, that this was the [...]
Read MoreIn my last post I discussed the merits of using the Liquibase database schema migration system as well some recommended practices we’ve been using. As a follow-up, I thought I’d post some of the code I left out as well some suggestions when introducing Liquibase to an existing system. First, some code. The dbdiff script [...]
Read MoreIt’s a hard sell to say, “Code is art”, especially if the buyer has never written a line of code in their life. I don’t deny that there is a high degree of truth to this assessment, but I just as easily see the disconnect. Art is bound to the notion of ambiguity, strangeness, and [...]
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