Software Engineering « Top Secret Project

But will it scale?

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

I am very pleased to announce the availibility of the Hypothetical Megastructure “but will it scale” t-shirt.

The t-shirt provdes the wearer with the following powers:

Effortlessly win any technical discussion instantly!
Impress your friends!
Immediately dismiss any rival language or framework!

“BUT WILL IT SCALE“?

Available in LARGE, EXTRA-LARGE, GRID, and the apparently defunct N-TIER.

I like to wear mine in a cluster (simply buy two or more t-shirts and wear simultaneously).

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Scalability, Software Engineering, Technology, Web 2.0 | 6 Comments »

Miscellany

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I used to have a lot more time for blogging. Now it’s all steam ahead with the actual paying work. I’ve actually had to turn down some projects recently.

My latest project is live and generating a lot of traffic. I built the promotional site for the latest Gillette product - The Gillette Fusion Power Phantom. Very tight deadline, but I made it on time and under budget.

I’ve also been involved with some work on Hotel.com.au, which is actually old-school MS Access and Visual Basic. I am quite enjoying it. Sure beats the hell out of PHP.

Posted in Development, Freelance, Programming, Software Engineering | No Comments »

backup_fu: making Amazon S3 backups simple

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

My favourite new plugin for Ruby on Rails is backup_fu.

backup_fu makes managing Amazon S3 backups really simple.

I have been running my own Rake Task for MySQL Backup to Amazon S3, but I’ve switched my projects over to backup_fu instead because it has much better control over your backups and will even backup stored files.

I’ve also created a patch for backup_fu that allows you to specify the mysqldump options. It should get rolled into an upcoming release, but if you would like it sooner, just contact me at toby…@info-architects.net.

Posted in Amazon S3, MySQL, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering | No Comments »

CodeIgniter: I Don’t Hate It

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

The unfortunate tragedy of my life is that I don’t get to develop in Ruby on Rails all the time. No, unfortunately for me, a large number of my clients need work done in PHP.

Which, as already indicated in several previous nuanced discussions, I hate.

I mean, really really HATE.

But that’s not the point of this post.

After being seriously burnt by the twin miseries of CakePHP’s poor documentation and desperately misguided attempt to mimic Rails I went looking for a new PHP MVC framework for a recent project.

Crucial requirements:

lack of opinion
simplicity
good documentation
understands PHP is not Ruby

I really wanted something that was pure VC, leaving out the M.

Views, Controllers and Models can go to hell.

PHP’s complete lack of dynamicism (and yes, I know PHP 5 has a crack at it, but whatever) means any attempt at Hibernate or Rails-style ORM is doomed to failure. And after screaming at CakePHP every time a finder returns an array of nested hashes of arrays of hashes and you can never work out how to just iterate through the records I’ve gone back to ADODB. You run a query and are returned a Record Set. I know this just reveals how long I spent in the late 90s hacking ASP, but if any language was still living in the late 90s, it’s PHP. And it’s actually quite good at it.

Where was I?

Right. Clean View/Controller mechanism. No Models.

Enter CodeIgniter.

It’s incredibly simple, the only assumption it makes is that you may never need most of the stuff it includes, so everything is an option, and it has great documentation.

CodeIgniter: I Don’t Hate It.

If you really have to use PHP, it’s worth a look.

Posted in CakePHP, CodeIgniter, PHP, Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Technology | 12 Comments »

Party like it’s 1999 - Social Networks are for Suckers

Monday, January 28th, 2008

It feels to me a lot like 99. Recession on the horizon, and so many people rushing to jump on the NextBigThing, with little thought, planning, insight or vision.

Every other day I quote on another Social Network project. It’s not my idea, I just need to pay the rent.

All of the requests are essentially the same

Like Facebook for X

Where X is a niche market.

Or the ever-popular:

X but with social networking features

Where X is an existing service or product.

My answer is fairly consistent.

I can do this, but it might make sense to develop something using the Facebook API and leverage the existing network and tools.

Despite this advice, many people seem convinced they can play in this space.

The hard part is not the software.

The hard part is building the community in the first place.

You can download any number of free applications that can manage an online community - the technology is not the problem. The real problem is attracting people to your application.

The true value of the Facebook Platform is the network. Facebook have the community already - all you have to do is build an application and participate in the social graph.

It’s still a hard job, but it’s easier than starting from scratch.

To this end, and given that most of my work in recent months has been developing Facebook Applications, I have started my own software company, aimed at doing exactly this - leverage the existing social networks:

FiniteStateMachine - Software Development for Social Networks

If you’re thinking of building a social network or social network features, why not discuss your ideas with us first, we might just be able to help you save time and money with a strategy for Facebook and friends.

Posted in Facebook, Facebook API, FiniteStateMachine, Freelance, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, TextMate | No Comments »

Dear PHP and CakePHP

Friday, January 11th, 2008

I hate you.

That is all.

Posted in Development, PHP, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology | 5 Comments »

Why Rails is better than whatever it is you use: ToDo List in 5 Lines

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Rob Mayhew prepared this ToDo List Tutorial

rails todo
cd todo
rake db:create:all
script/generate scaffold Todo title:string body:text done:boolean due:datetime
rake db:migrate

Update: This code pretty much also provides you with a REST API.

Posted in Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

RailsCamp 2.0

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

RailsCamp is on this weekend. 40 uber-geeks gathered to immerse themselves in Ruby On Rails.
It should be pretty cool.

I haven’t prepared any materials, but might present something on Amazon Web Services - I did this for the Melbourne Ruby User Group a little while ago.

Posted in Code, Development, Programming, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Technology, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Converting a FaceBook App to use Amazon S3

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I’ve just completed work on another Facebook application: Songbook.

This was a relatively straight forward conversion of the existing application to use S3 for data storage. Songbook allows users to upload and display a song in their Facebook Profile. The original development stored the files on disk and hit limits really fast … hosting large numbers of files becomes very expensive very quickly, not to mention performance issues.

I converted the whole thing to S3 very quickly - it’s actually easier in some respects to handle storing files in S3 than to disk. The application now has essentially limitless and very cost-effective storage capacity.

S3 really is incredible.

Posted in Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, Development, Facebook, Freelance, PHP, Programming, Software Engineering | No Comments »

New York, New York

Monday, November 12th, 2007

I’ve been living in Melbourne for 7 years now, and I have decidely itchy feet.

I moved to Melbourne for work just after the dot-com crash of 2000 and it was always meant to be a temporary stop on my way to New York, which I visited and fell in love with.

I think it’s time to get that dream moving again.

I am happy to work remotely to get a foot in the door, if that suits. Happy to sign up for a short-term contract if it gets me to your fair city.

So, if you’re in New York and need a developer with lots of experience, expert skills in Java, PHP and Ruby, and a penchant for user experience, drop me a line.

Posted in Development, Facebook, Freelance, GodofCode, Interface Design, Javascript, Notes, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Technology, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

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