Author Archive

Just a quick update to let you know that I’ll be moving more of my business-related topics to the Planet Argon Blog. I invite you to subscribe to that feed as well. :-)p.s. We just published Episode 4 of the Planet Argon Podcast, which was on the topic of Hiring designers. ...
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Welcome to what seems like my tenth installment (actually, it’s the fourth) of showing you how I setup my development environment on a fresh OSX install. In this case, I’m actually getting a MacBook setup for a new employee with Snow Leopard.Over the years, I’ve evolved these following steps and they’ve helped our team...
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Earlier this evening, I accepted a pull-request for theme number 18, which is now included in Oh My Zsh. To celebrate, I’ve updated the themes wiki page with fresh screenshots.Here is a sampling of some of the themes that you can use out of the box with Oh My Zsh.Oh My Zsh is much...
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Will refrain from any political commentary, but was notified by some friends that the GOP was using the source code for RubyURL for their new URL shortening site (gop.am).To celebrate, I decided to daisy chain a few rubyurl-based sites together and came up with: http://rubyurl.com/hj6lEnjoy!As always, you can fork/clone here
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While reviewing some code recently, I came across controller code that resembled the following.if @customer.save CustomerMailer.deliver_welcome_message(@customer) flash = "Your account has been successfully created. We've sent you a welcome letter with..." redirect_to dashboard_path else ... endFairly typical Rails code. Nothing alarming here, but I wanted to evaluate the call to the mailer...
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Recently, Carlos, suggested that I should start sharing some basic SQL tips that help with performance and/or general usage. I recently came across some code that I didn’t like to read and/or write. For example, let’s take the following…SELECT * FROM brochures WHERE published_at <= now() AND archived_at >= now()Essentially, this is pulling back...
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For those of you who didn’t make it to Rails Underground in July to witness my mind-blowing talk, Launching Ruby on Rails projects , it appears that Skills Matter has finally posted a video of it online. :-)The sound levels are really low… but hopefully you’ll find it helpful.You can also view the slides.Related...
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Earlier this week, we published Episode 3 of the Planet Argon Podcast. In this latest episode we responded to one of the ideas someone in the audience asked on this brainstormr, which was, “How do you manage bugs?”We had a round table discussion about how we classify and prioritize bugs with our clients, ticketing...
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As mentioned in a recent article1, I’ve been diving deep into Google Analytics lately while working on a few client projects. We’re aiming to use much more of the features of Google Analytics and have been hitting some roadblocks with the development versus production application environments. Once you begin to dive into event tracking...
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Earlier this week our new podcast was approved and is now available in the Apple iTunes Store. We’re also soliciting topic ideas for future episodes on brainstormr.We posted Episode 2, The Letter Scotch, yesterday for your enjoyment. In this episode, we covered a handful of web browser tools that we use (and detest) to...
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