By Sarah | April 17, 2011
I’m excited to be moderating a WCA Mobile SIG panel on May 10th in San Jose. On the panel will be leaders of the top cross-platform mobile frameworks, Rhomobile (Rhodes), Nitobi (PhoneGap) and Appcelerator (Titanium) along with the relative newcomer AppMakr.
Walk-Ins are welcome if there’s space, but I would advise reserving your spot ahead of [...]
There was some discussion, if you can call it that, on twitter yesterday about the proliferation of RSpec and Cucumber, over Test::Unit. I don’t believe that Twitter is an effective medium for well-reasoned debate. I do believe that it is worth discussing why we like one technology over another, so we can learn from each [...]
By Sarah | February 15, 2011
I spent a little time working on some tests for a legacy web app that we plan to re-write in Ruby. Before the big re-write, I thought it would be wise to write some integration tests to call the app via http and verify responses. I wanted to use vanilla http and not [...]
By Sarah | January 30, 2011
Last week’s distance learning experiment was a success! We had a few technical glitches… I forgot to hit the “record” button at the beginning and after the break and didn’t set the meeting time to last the whole session, so I’ll be repeating the class today at 4pm PST. The Blazing Cloud blog [...]
By Sarah | January 24, 2011
Tomorrow night we’re planning an experiment in distance learning. If it works out, we’ll offer our evening Blazing Cloud classes with a (for pay) online option, but for starters we thought we would try out the tech. If you want to join us at 6:30pm for an introduction to Ruby on Rails, please [...]
By Sarah | January 1, 2011
In the past few years there has been significant changes in mobile development. More than half of the world population now has a mobile phone — more people than have access to personal computers. Mobile phones have compute power that exceeds that of personal computers when I started programming and smartphones are gaining [...]
By Sarah | December 29, 2010
Abhishek Parolkar writes that flawlessness is not about perfection, its about how complete can you become after accepting reality. He offers this amazing video that illustrates this idea:
It reminds me of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks where he tells stories from his clinical practice about people with [...]
By Sarah | November 26, 2010
This holiday I learned how to play backward Stratego — a variant of the old strategy game. We used a set which has wizards, elves and dragons, but I’m sure it would be just as fun with a standard set. I expected it to be frustrating, but it was surprisingly fun.
Setup
Set [...]
By Sarah | November 18, 2010
The overall economy still sucks — I read that this is not just the US, but a global problem. Meanwhile, in my little corner of the world, I run into people everyday who are frustrated that they can’t find good Rails engineers to hire. I’ve written that companies need to hire people who [...]
By Sarah | November 16, 2010
After my last post, I had a twitter conversation with @dhh about his talk and my reflections on it. I’m still not sure he understands that his talk wasn’t “weird-cool” like his example of _why, nor do I think it was an example of “weird-angry” that the Ruby community would disdain. Instead it [...]