Whilst writing an Adobe Lightroom plugin to upload library items to a rails app, i spotted something i definitely need to play with! Adobe Air and Merb file uploader. Looks rather handy!
Archive for October, 2008
Merb & Adobe Air File Uploader – Nice!
October 29th, 2008Dave Thomas: Security as a measure of effectiveness
October 26th, 2008I really like this approach – Assess the state of security within a development team and project as an indication of how well a project is going and how effective processes are working out.
It’s another one of those many obvious tests that we all do, but at times i’ve certainly found myself accepting insecurity within a project team as one of those things because the team are new to the pressures or software projects are always uncertain and as such stressful. With a little consideration, it’s clearly more useful to use perceptions of insecurity as more direct indications that change is required.
What might we be looking for? A few possible ideas:
- How secure are the developers about the quality and stability of their code?
- How secure are the developers about rolling code to the various hosting platforms?
- How secure are team members about their relationship with others on the team?
- How secure is the project manager about hitting the deadline?
- How secure is the account manager about conversations with the client?
- How secure are senior management about project and team performance?
The overall intention of improving security is to make everyone feel relaxed. Software development is meant to be fun after all!
Source: Agile Toolkit Podcast ‘No fluff just stuff 2006 tour’
Jason Calacanis – work hard and succeed. don’t and fail
October 15th, 2008A blunt and no-nonsense approach: Watch the video on Work/Life Balance and Blood Sweat and Tears
37Signals don’t like his style, but in person i very much got where he was coming from – work hard and succeed! As it happens, I’m not working at his pace currently as it’s time for a family life (well, as well as working hard, just not 6-7 days a week like i have in the past), but what he says about people not pulling their weight rings too many bells!
Calacanis has more advice on “How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)“ here
Sproutcore – 1st impressions
October 14th, 2008
Today i had a short play with Sproutcore (the “Cocoa for the Web” JS framework used by and optimized by Apple for me.com) for the first time. I was a little surprised with what i found.
The Great
- The development tools are in Ruby using the merb framework
- The development tools adopt a Rails like MVC architectural pattern, with commands like
sc-gen model example/contact
sc-gen controller example/detail
sc-gen view example/card
- The development tools include build tools that prepare all JS, HTML and CSS ready to be distributed.
sc-build - The development tools have a bunch of ruby (rails-style) helpers
<%= button_view :my_button, :label => 'Here is a functioning button!' %>
The not so great
- It doesn’t work with the latest version of Merb (0.9.9 RC1) and doesn’t appear happy even having it around (even if 0.9.4 is installed, if seems to force a removal of 0.9.9 in order to work) – Patch submitted, but only recently.
I’ll keep playing and posting what i find, plus an app or 2 as i create them.
Check out these links for more info:
