Happy New Years 2011!

Welcome to 1/1/11. Only one more year until the apocalypse comes. Is everyone ready?

Anyway, as with the New Year comes the New Years Resolution. My New Years Resolution is quite simple: gain 50 pounds by June 1 and then trim that down to the "recommended" or "ideal" weight of around 135 to 145 by the end of the year. If I don't make it by June 1, I'll shift the goal line to the end of the year.

Kia Kroas :=: 06 Jan, 2011 02:01:56

What's there for a developer to display on their portfolio?

OK, so there are a whole bunch of amazing portfolios by web designers out there. I won't name any names, but many of them are amazing, beautiful and astonishingly creative--even by designer standards (that is to say beautiful standards). Inherently though, the portfolio sites are a simple single page or a handful of pages. The actual portfolio listing screenshots of the design, the about page with background information and a couple brief paragraphs about history, personality, and skill set, and lastly the contact page. That's all they really need, anymore would be wasteful. However, it doesn't show any of their knowledge in web development--by which I mean the workings of the functionality behind the design: JavaScript interaction, database abstractions, and business logic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing on the designers or their sites. The issue is I am not a web designer, I am a web developer.

Kia Kroas :=: 17 Dec, 2010 02:25:56

How to queue a class method with delayed job

Ok, so you have a project using Delayed Job but need to queue a class method. But oh no! You can't queue a class method because of either "ArgumentError: Cannot enqueue items which do not respond to perform" or "TypeError: can't dump anonymous class Class". What do you do now?

The simple and clean solution: use Resque [1] instead. It scales a lot better and doesn't put extra overhead on your database. Seriously consider for a moment that each delayed job worker is querying the database once every second...the same database that your application is probably using to load its models. Resque offsets that by using a fast keystore database separate from the other models (unless you're using redis models, but if you do that then ... haha?). But for those of you who can't use resque for one reason or another, here's a little piece of code that will give something similar.

[1] I don't like how resque is supposed to be pronounced like rescue, it should be pronounced like resk.

Kia Kroas :=: 17 Dec, 2010 02:14:02

14 days to Halloween 2010

Halloween - the only time of the year when parents encourage kids to walk around at night and take candy from strangers.

It's been way too long since I've written anything, so I think it's about time I started picking up my pencil again. Anyway, in recent developments: not much.

Kia Kroas :=: 17 Oct, 2010 01:45:12 last updated: 17 Oct, 2010 01:47:28

The Ugly Examples

I wrote in the last article that this week I would be giving some code samples to further explain my position on why I consider code to be ugly. That will probably be the last time I mention a follow up on a post inside the post. Anyway, here it is.

Kia Kroas :=: 13 Apr, 2010 09:29:44

Code is not Beautiful. Algorithms are Beautiful, Code is Ugly.

As a programmer, I've done a lot of coding over the years. I've come to the realization that most code is ugly. Not ugly enough that I'm repulsed by it, but ugly enough to be called ugly rather than just not pretty. Beautiful code does exist, but it's usually in tiny little snippets and very rare. Ugly is too strong of a four-letter word to describe the majority of code that I have not seen and probably will never see in my lifetime. However, I will use it here for lack of a better, more pronounced term.

Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying it's the formatting that's causing ugly code, I'm saying it's a fundamental property of all programming languages. (Written language to me is ugly as well, but that's for some other time.) The syntax, the grammar, the vocabulary, the keywords, and the punctuation are just so absolutely not beautiful. And...considering the hack-ish code necessary in order to parse and tokenize all that ugly, I really think I'm right to say code is ugly.

Kia Kroas :=: 04 Apr, 2010 06:47:07

Ruby on Rails, Paperclip, Uploadify and S3

I've been doing lots of work with Heroku. Since Heroku only deals with with application side and the filesystem is treated as though it were read-only, file storing has been done through Amazon S3. thoughtbot's Paperclip is being used to make file maintenance easier.

However, since clients nowadays want the fanciness of Web 2.0, the uploads were to have progress bars. So, because the sites were using jQuery the applications ended up being integrated with Uploadify.