My Etsy store has been doing well, but I’d like to overcome the friction of requiring an Etsy account. To reach a wider audience, I’d like to additionally offer my products on a site that wasn’t specific to a community. To that end, I created a tool which generates a static HTML + Javascript eCommerce site. Here’s the result: Creative Retrospection. Continue reading »
Feb 132012
Aug 282011
Ruby’s standard library includes the Singleton module, which lets you easily implement the singleton pattern. It can make unit testing a little difficult, though, because you cannot easily instantiate different versions of the class. This post will look at three solutions, two of which are hackish/wrong, and one of which is basic and clean (imho). Continue reading »
For Inspectinator (a sinatra microapp), I needed a database-less authentication solution that was as lightweight as possible, but with a reasonable amount of security and maintainability. I came up with something that suits this purpose well, and I’m sharing it in case anyone is looking for something similar. I call it EasyAuth. Continue reading »
For Inspectinator, I needed a lightweight token generator to allow people to share their results. I found a great solution, and learned a cool ruby trick, too. Continue reading »
Feb 142010
I’ve been wanting to experiment with sinatra for a while, so I popped something off my things-to-do-someday list and put together Inspectinator. It’s aim is pretty straight-forward: parse standard ruby #inspect strings into a more palatable form. It parses a string into a system of nested objects, and displays it as a tree. Some simple jQuery let’s you drill down to the level of detail you want. Continue reading »
Aug 302009
This weekend I was in Nashville, TN for Ruby Hoedown 2009. There were some great talks — my favorites were Ben Mabey’s Cucumber talk, Luigi Montanez’s talk on using public data APIs for civic coding, and Jim Weirich’s excellent (and impromtu) talk on Git’s internals. Continue reading »
Aug 242009
As part of my Erlang self-education, I’m doing a selection of sample problems (from the “Programming Erlang” book) in both Erlang and my language of choice: Ruby. The idea is to explore the differences between these very different languages.
Today’s problem is to write a ring network benchmark. Continue reading »
Aug 242009
I’ve been playing around with Erlang lately, and it’s been quite a departure from the language I’m most comfortable with (and use everyday): Ruby. As part of my exploration, I’m doing a variety of sample problems (from the “Programming Erlang” book, among other places) in both Ruby and Erlang, and comparing the different implementations I come up with. Continue reading »
I came across this issue the other day at work, and I’m not really sure how I feel about it. It doesn’t necessarily seem right or wrong, but was definitely unintuitive for me… Continue reading »
Aug 162009
Continuing towards my goal of developing an application in ruby for my Android (see part 1), I’ve been getting into Rhodes, which is an open-source project that aims to allow you to build native apps for a variety of mobile platforms, all from a lightweight ruby framework. For Android, it uses xruby (not Jruby). Continue reading »
I'm a software engineer in Chicago, working at 
