andy goundry » software development

Getting up and running with Git and Rails on EC2

andy — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 23:17:20 +0000

Here’s a short list of things to do to get Git and Rails running on EC2:

Install Git

sudo yum install -y git

sudo yum install -y git

Install Rails

sudo yum install -y rubygems ruby-devel gcc libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel mysql mysql-devel
sudo gem update –system
sudo gem install rails

Quick notes on creating a local git branch and pushing it into the wild

andy — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:06:15 +0000

Checkout the branch you want to switch from
git checkout branch_to_branch_from
Create the local branch
git branch branch_name
Switch to the branch
git checkout branch_name
Push to Remote
git push origin branch_name

Busy consultancy life, growing family, and blogging

andy — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:52:17 +0000

Just posting because i haven’t posted in months. This is just a post about the interesting balance (or potential lack of it) when running an IT consultancy.

It’s an odd one – business is booming; clients are a-plenty; clients are happy and all extending our working contracts; all is smooth and rosy. But, in this focus on business growth and client satisfaction, there’s little time to give to feeding back into the community: I’m not attending many events; i’m not blogging much; i’m not tweeting many interesting finds. I’m just working hard, making clients happy and getting paid.

I do know others in the community who focus very much on their relationships within the community, and more on sharing and expressing than on earning. I know others who have a dedicated focus on creating products for the future.

So, i have to say that mine is a short-termist view: Generate the revenue and deliver. Of course, along with that comes the creation of some great business relationships (clients and partners), but it’s highly in the present and focused.

So, in fairness, with my family’s desire to move into a much bigger house, i have to say that the business focus isn’t planning to shift within the next 6 months. After that, we’ll see. I definitely want to create a saleable product. Of that, i’m very sure.

Call TextMate from command line

andy — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:15:04 +0000

A really neat feature of TextMate is the ability to call it from the command line and pass a directory or file as the object to open. Works great.

For this to work, you need to run a quick one-liner on the command line:

sudo ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate /usr/local/bin/mate

Once done, you can call mate and pass it any object you want to open, such as:

$ mate my_rails_app

and it opens the entire directory as if it were a TextMate project.

Lots more detail available here: http://manual.macromates.com/en/using_textmate_from_terminal.html

Setting up Merb, Cucumber and Webrat (and friends) on Snow Leopard

andy — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:36:06 +0000

My upgrade to Snow Leopard killed my Merb, Cucumber and Webrat setup so i had to start afresh. That was the bad. The good is that some manual hacks that were required in Leopard are no longer necessary, meaning I can rely on direct gem installations.

Here’s what i did:

Install Ruby and Gems
Follow instructions on http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-rails-on-snow-leopard/
Install merb, rspec, cucumber, merb_cucumber and mongrel and dependencies
sudo gem install merb rspec cucumber roman-merb_cucumber mongrel term-ansicolor treetop diff-lcs nokogiri do_sqlite3
Install webrat
sudo gem install hoe hpricot webrat
Fix Firefox bug with Snow Leopard
For some reason the libsqlite3.dylib library in FireFox 3.5.2 is out of date and breaks cucumber under Snow Leopard. Thankfully, it’s a simple fix:
mv /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib.orig
cp /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib
Install Selenium
sudo gem install Selenium
sudo gem install selenium-client
Install the textmate cucumber bundle
http://github.com/bmabey/cucumber-tmbundle/tree/master

Deprecated Instructions on Snow Leopard that were required on Leopard

The following ugly hacks were required on Leopard with it’s default Ruby installation. These are no longer required (at least on my machine) on Snow Leopard:

Manual hack of Selenium

http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/setting-up-selenium

As the instructions recommended replacing the Selemium RC jar file () in the installed gem with one from the Selenium website, i had to find out where the gem had installed. Thankfully, gem -h pointed me toward gem help commands and from there i ran gem environment – This told me where gems are installed locally and i found that Selemium RC had been installed into /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/Selenium-1.1.14/ I replaced as advised and then ran selenium from within the app root and all worked fine, using the replacement. I then downloaded and ran the test selenium code from http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/tree/master/examples/selenium running selenium in a different console and then running cucumber examples/selenium/features/ . It worked a treat and booted up selenium as required. Great!

Manual hack installation of webrat

Download http://github.com/gwynm/webrat/tree/master tar file. Git clone doesn’t work

sudo gem install hoe hpricot
cd downloaded and untarred file
rake gem
sudo gem install pkg/webrat-0.2.1.gem

Awesome tools for rapid UX prototypes – Letting you focus on the solution!

andy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:39:52 +0000

Comic Life is great for creating story flows in a rough and ready way, with a little style.

Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

Important iPhone Push Notification consideration

andy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:45:32 +0000

A point worth noting by all iPhone developers considering the exciting opportunities of cloud-side iPhone app notifications – how much will it cost you to provide this service?

An important point to consider.

Yes, Story Driven Development has an acronym. Oh, and here’s a definition and further reading too!

andy — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:57:37 +0000

As i was asked, i happily confirm the acronym: STDD. I’ve also provided a lovely definition by Tracy Reppert and a pdf from August 2004 for more reading:

“The basic premise is that before any code is written, a team takes a story (or rough idea of a requirement) and fleshes out that story by producing an executable ’story test’.

Opponents say that STDD is ‘cowboy coding’, or ’snake oil’, or just ‘a hindrance to real work.’ Proponents argue that STDD produces the simplest system possible and is the wave of the future, the new frontier.”

All written in 2004! I’m just happy it’s finding its feet in smaller web agencies now. Well, at least the one work for (yes, i’m kind of pushing it)!

Here’s also a lovely PDF:

http://www.industriallogic.com/papers/storytest.pdf

iPhone development: Stage 1: Familiarise self with Objective C

andy — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 22:07:15 +0000

Thanks apple for this primer:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/objectivecprimer.action;jsessionid=EBE50C6510FD05380290B42E0C4E8EC6.worker10

I’ll add comments as i get through this primer.

iCode iPhone Programming Blog

andy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:48:13 +0000

http://icodeblog.com/

Neat!