technicalpickles

Open Source ProjectsCode that Might be Useful to You

Talks I've GivenOn Technologies and Ideas

ThoughtsWhere I Sometimes Write Things

Resume If You Believe In Those

Follow Me On

GitHubIf coding is your thing

TwitterIf you tweet

Here you can find some of my finest works, in the form of websites and presentations.

Quick links

Websites
Technical Pickles
Boston.rb
SNIF Tag
FlockUp
Presentations
git as a subversion replacement
Extracting Plugins and Gems From Rails applications
RailsRumble 2008 Retrospective
Rake: The Familiar Stranger

Websites

Technical Pickles

You're looking at it!

One of the goals of this site is to be my central web presence. To that end, you can find my resume and portfolio, and link to my content on other sites.

This site is also my first Rails application deployed into production. Some noteworthy plugins and gems used:

I host and deploy it myself on a self-managed SliceHost VPS. Here are some of the pieces in the deployment stack:

For tracking hits and exposure, I use:

I host the source for this on GitHub in a private repository.

Boston.rb

This site was built to serve as a portal for everything having to do with Ruby in the Boston area. Among other things, we currently provide:

  • Event listings
  • Video recordings of meetings
  • Job postings
  • Projects built by Boston Rubyists

It was created one night at a hackfest. Since then, Dan Croak and I have been continuing to improve and maintain it.

SNIF Tag

I came onboard at SNIF Labs a few months before their big launch. A large portion of my work was preparing for this, usually in the form of improving the site's infrastructure and maintainability.

FlockUp

FlockUp is a tool for helping connect users on Twitter. Twitter is a big place, so it can be hard to find the right people to associate with. FlockUp's goal is to help people find others with similiar interests.

FlockUp was built in 48 hours as part the RailsRumble 2008 competition, collaborating with fellow Boston Rubyist and Twitterer Wyatt Greene. We did all the interface design, feature planning, and general technical direction in the weeks before the competition. The 48 hours was used for graphic design, implementation, and deployment.

Some of the tools we used for development includes:

  • rails
  • resources_controller
  • shoulda
  • factory_girl
  • ZenTest
  • twitter
  • starling
  • HAML
  • Blueprint CSS

It was deployed to a Linode slice running nginx and MySQL on Gentoo Linux

Presentations

git as a subversion replacement

I gave this talk at the June 2008 Boston Ruby Group meeting. The slides are available:

It was also included on the 'featured' section of SlideShare on June 12th, 2008.

Extracting Plugins and Gems from Rails application

I gave this talk at the October 2008 Boston Ruby Group Meeting. The slides are available:

RailsRumble 2008 Retrospective

Dan Croak, Wyatt Greene, and myself gave this presentation at the November 2008 Bosotn Ruby Group Meeting.

Rake: The Familiar Stranger

I gave this talk at the December 2008 Boston Ruby Group Meeting. The slides and video are available: