Etherdev Tumblr

A Tumblr about application design with fun stuff like Ruby, Sinatra, Rails, iOS, ExtJS and Sencha Touch Heyya... I'm J Ryan Williams. In short, I develop web and mobile applications. I'm using this to collect thoughts on things I'm reading, testing or pondering regarding application design.

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I posted this before on my personal feed, but it's worth posting again. This is maybe the best talk I’ve seen on how creativity works and the immediacy of responsiveness needed from your tools and process to be productive.

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It's amazing how a few hours of sleep can greatly reduce your rabid desire to perform hoodoo curses on Paypal. Reduce.

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Great talk by Bob Martin on what "killed" Smalltalk and if Ruby is in danger of the same demise... his point being that the test-first movement is one of three things that could keep that from happening. This is from '09... I'm still catching up with many of these presentations (which I got bad about ignoring for a few years). I've wanted to play with some Smalltalk for a while, actually. Good things to be learned there... which is what lead me here.

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Best presentation I've seen on application design & coupling... and really just *what* "design" is and how to proceed safely with the unknown. I mean... WOW. Sandi Metz is my new hero. Looking forward to her book!

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We've started a developer apprenticeship program in Fayette Co, GA. In case you know someone in the area interested. :)

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This article collects my reading and thoughts over the last couple of weeks regarding my personally evolving approach to Rails development. The goal is a separation of concerns which are agnostic of the framework and data structure; a view-layer-agnostic API for the domain with no required knowledge of internals; and a method for unit testing each layer without the framework (for speed and simplicity).

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WP e-Commerce with Nginx 404 errors on AJAX fun

Having spent hours digging into this issue with little help from the getshopped forums, I figured I should share this. I have a client who is using Nginx as web server and we're hosting a Wordpress site along with some Rails apps from the same server. Now, Wordpress itself plays perfectly fine with Nginx assuming you get the configuration right (see posts from Chris Kempson and the Nginx wiki for that). The biggest issue is really centered around permalinks, which a simple little plugin called Nginx Compatibility typically deals with quite nicely.

Unfortunately, WPEC doesn't play well with this setup (at least as of this writing using WP e-Commerce 3.8.7.2). If you try to use "pretty urls" of any kind, WPEC will attempt to append index.php to any of its AJAX calls (use Firebug console to see the POST) which results in a 404 error on those calls.

The only solution (or, a hacky compromise that I HATE, really) that I've been able to come up with so far is to disable Nginx Compatibility and set permalinks to something like the following:

/index.php/%category%/%postname%/

(Update the permalinks settings TWICE, and then flush the WPEC Theme cache)

You should be able to use any variety of permalink there, but the critical part is the /index.php/ slug. It's ugly. And as I said, I hate it. But it does keep WPEC from applying index.php to calls and suddenly you can update your cart, clear the cart, etc.

There may be another way around this that I've just not yet figured out (a rewrite rule that catches the index.php being applied by WPEC, maybe?) which would allow you to kill the silly slug from your permalinks and re-activate Nginx Compatibility. But the better thing would be for getshopped to fix this in the next update. There is no good reason that index.php should be appended to any Wordpress path. If I get some time, I'll try to find the offending code in the plugin and offer a solution.

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Live and let die

It's funny to me when social media "professionals" get up in arms about how a major brand handles an internet campaign with which they have no professional association. Let other companies be morons... worry about your own clients. I don't think anyone is really buying into your personal branding attempts disguised as outrage.

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Bye Bye to_json! Hello RABL!

RABL is awesome. We've been building a json API for use with iOS apps*, and the Rails to_json method has time and time again proven to be a bit of a PITA... not to mention messy as hell. Enter the fine folks at Miso. The combination of RABL to create json templates with the far faster yajl-ruby parser have solved a lot of our issues. Still a couple little bugs with Rails 3.1 that need ironing out. In fact, an issue with recognizing partials looks like it will be committed soon. Which will allow me to DRY up a lot of what I'm doing. I'll be a very happy camper.

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Hybridizing My App Design Approach

Interesting to see how Ryan Singer of 37 signals approaches app design from the perspective of UI. Granted, he's mostly a UI designer, not a back-end programmer (in fact, he specifies where in the process he hands it off)... but, this is still oddly similar to how I worked several years ago before we started trying TDD/BDD. Of course, I was also more the UI guy between the two of us.

Recently, I've put UI off until after writing a lot of tests on the model. And after that is exactly were I feel stuck.... lost on trying to envision Cucumber features before being able to see anything tangible. My brain _does not like_. Now, I think I'm going to try and merge the two approaches... rough-sketch basic model relationships, wireframe really raw UI, translate that into simple HTML templates, THEN start spec'ing the models... then describe the sketches in Cucumber features and finally start implementing code. That makes way more sense to me. I feel like I really need those steps of sketching wire-frames and getting a static version in the browser before I can fully envision the integration tests.

The momentum feels better so far. I firmed up about 12 wireframes today (the bulk of my app's non-admin side) and should have html templates built by tomorrow. And it's hella more fun this way. I mentioned how much I like the Draft app for iPad, right? :) (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draft/id375570329)

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This is a great article by John Nunemaker about the benefits of using MongoDB in Ruby on Rails. I've wanted to mess around with document-oriented databases for a while (we were considering it with Capocus! 2.5 back in early 2009 even, but it felt too new). And since I'm starting from scratch with Capocus! 3 in Rails 3.1, I figure there's no time like now. I've been going back and forth on CouchDB vs. MongoDB. Since I'm hoping to do a good bit of iOS app tinkering for apps that work in conjunction with some Capocus implementations, CouchDB has some appealing features (REST, data sync across devices, small size for running on smartphones). But this article may have tipped me toward starting with MongoDB. It seems to have a more vibrant user base in the Rails community, and John's examples here are pretty exciting. And since Capocus! will likely be using a lot of internal stats logging, the need for better write performance might win out over MVCC). I may spend a day or two with each and see how it shakes out.

And yeah, this article is sorta old... so I have to wonder how if his experience since has changed anything. [Update: Found this lovely blog: http://mongotips.com/ which is recent. Also, have been turned onto Riak and the Ripple gem... so this has become more a choice between Riak and Mongo at this point.]

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People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Simon Sinek

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External rewards and punishments -- both carrots and sticks -- can work nicely for algorithmic tasks, but they can be devastating for heuristic ones. Those sorts of challenges -- solving novel problems or creating something the world didn't know it was missing -- depend heavily on Harlow's* third drive. Amabile** calls it The Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity, which holds in part: Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity. Controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.

excerpt from Drive, by Daniel H. Pink

*Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the worlds first laboratories for studying primate behavior.

**Teresa M. Amabile of Harvard Business School

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A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Mark Twain -- Essay on William Dean Howells (1906)

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The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Mark Twain, Letter to George Bainton, 15 October 1888

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A great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth.

Niels Bohr

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In any creative effort, one must do one's own thing, even if that thing is being done in response to another's order. To do otherwise is to seriously risk a result which will please neither the requestor nor the executor.

Edward Dmytryk -- from On Film Editing