First up is http://www.wadewinningham.com/2018/01/16/together-we-create/

While I’ll do some quick posts here to direct people I’ll eventually just have this site likely redirect over there at some point.

Fortune Magazine just named them the #1 Best Workplace for Millennials.

Our core development team is just a few people. We want more. If you want to be challenged. Are a UX/UI person, Ruby on Rails developer, Front-End developer, even interested in technical support, let me know.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/23/power-home-remodeling-millennias/

RethinkDB is an open source database that fits somewhere between a relational database like MySQL or PostgreSQL and newer schema-less databases like MongoDB. However, it’s got a few things I don’t think any other database has.

RethinkDB pushes results to your app in real time

Typically, you’d need a separate Publish-Subscribe system in place to do this.

With RethinkDB, you can start a query and request to get changes. Your app will automatically receive any changed data related to your query after that.

If you want something that’s closer to current Publish-Subscribe methods, RethinkDB has you covered there, too, with their repubsub library.

It’s insanely easy to cluster

This is right from their docs.

First, start RethinkDB on the first machine:

$ rethinkdb --bind all

Then start RethinkDB on the second machine:

$ rethinkdb --join IP_OF_FIRST_MACHINE:29015 --bind all

You now have a RethinkDB cluster!

That’s it.

RethinkDB’s web-based console is beautiful

RethinkDB comes with web-based console that most IT departments will want to display on the wall.

Read the official announcement at Rethink’s blog.

MojoLingo is our partner in regards to all things Adhearsion. And part of that is creating a custom chat client that does things no other chat client can do. And that’s offer things specific to our business that wouldn’t apply to just anyone. It’s about context.

RailsConf 2015 is in Atlanta, GA. Ben Klang, from MojoLingo, will be presenting about using WebRTC to put real-time voice, video and text into your Rails application.

We record those calls.

If we don’t reach someone, we simply record whether or not we left a message on their machine, or if it was truly a no-answer.

When we do reach someone and talk to them, Adhearsion records it. We do inform the person that we are recoding the call.

When a call hangs up, our Talkbox Adhearsion application sends an API call to our main Nitro application. The path of the audio recording and the home it’s linked to are included so Nitro can put them together into that home’s overall communication history.

Actually, my full resolution is to get into a daily practice of writing. Writing creatively was something I really loved doing at one point and I want to start that again. While writing somewhat technical blog posts for this site isn’t out of my imagination, writing is writing. So I plan to mix it up.

A long time ago…

Where did this come from? I’ve always loved reading. I’ve always loved comic books and would go to local conventions. One artist who worked for a company called Comico in the late 80’s frequented those local conventions. His name was Reggie Byers. For Comico, he was doing the art for some of their line of Macross comics. He started his own company and comic around a character named Shuriken.

For the hell of it, I ended up writing scripts for a three issue story arc for Shuriken and just sent it to him. He liked it and wanted me to write more. In fact, Reggie was starting up a second series entitled The Blade of Shuriken and he wanted me to the be writer. Images are hard to find, but here’s one that has my name in the credits!

Unfortunately, the series was short lived. One of the victims of an economic bubble bursting within the comics industry. I ended up writing about twelve scripts. Only four were published (Blade of Shuriken #2-#5). Regardless, I had a lot of fun writing them. I thank Reggie for giving me the opportunity. It was a very exciting experience for me.

This year for this site…

Getting back to this technical site, I still am primarily a Ruby on Rails coder. A couple of side projects with PHP, but primarily Ruby.

Back in 2007, I started working with a company in the northeast, Power Home Remodeling Group. At the time, they ran their business off a mixture of Excel spreadsheets and a Microsoft Access-based application that would have problems if more than one person was in it at the same time. I’m involved in writing the software that has taken them from that system, already having growing pains, to what is now a web-based application servicing over 1,300 employees company-wide. While I started alone, we’ve grown a small team of developers, but it’s still hard to keep up with the demand for what they want and need.

PowerHRG doesn’t sound like an exciting company since they sell windows, roofing, siding and a couple of other products. But the complexity of the business and the technology required to support it can be quite interesting. I’m going to write about some of that over this year.

What I’ll be focusing on in my first series of articles will be on something I don’t recall reading a lot of blog posts about in the recent past: telephony. Power’s app has strong ties to their phone system. The interface for this is Adhearsion. We are lucky enough to work closely together with the awesome team at Mojolingo, who are the current maintainers of the Adhearsion codebase.

Stay tuned…

The Mental Notes card deck is a brainstorming tool. “Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications.”

In addition to those, we’ve launched a few sites for a client.

After The Meeting is a site that helps you focus on what typically happens not during a meeting, but after. It helps attendees keep track of what action items they were assigned and pokes you at times to get them done if you’re running late. It’s particularly helpful to project managers who can, at a glance, get status updates. And after a few weeks, you get a report card report telling you how successful everyone’s been on what they committed to.

Part of After the Meeting is a way to make a formal agreement with someone. This is a bit stronger than a simple to-do item as there are stakes for the success or failure of the task.

Promise Play takes those formal agreements out of meetings so it’s just you and one of your Facebook friends. We’re still polishing it up, but it’s free to use.

Other than that, I’m slowly working on a redesign of this site and looking forward to a project that’s been on the back-burner for a little while.

See the slides on SpeakerDesk

For a Rails application, there are a few plugins which make it easy to use Sphinx. The main two at this time are UltraSphinx and Thinking Sphinx. I chose Thinking Sphinx for my project mostly because it can keep the Sphinx indexes current in close to real-time as things are added to the database using delta indexes. UltraSphinx can use delta indexes, but doesn’t seem to be as real-time at updating them as ThinkingSphinx. If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Now that I’m using Thinking Sphinx I eventually had to deploy it. Since I didn’t find much info about deploying it using “Capistrano”:http://capify.org here’s what I did to get deployments running smoothly.

Sphinx Index Location

While Sphinx is fast, you still probably don’t want to have to re-create your indexes on every deployment. I have my indexes getting created into my shared path and an :after_symlink task deals with making sure my app is pointing to the right place.

  desc "Re-establish symlinks"
  task :after_symlink do
    run <<-CMD
      rm -fr #{release_path}/db/sphinx &&
      ln -nfs #{shared_path}/db/sphinx #{release_path}/db/sphinx
    CMD
  end

Stopping and Starting Sphinx

Thinking Sphinx follows convention rather than configuration. Before any index Thinking Sphinx re-creates your configuration file based on the information in your models. Since it re-creates it, I have it ignored in my repository. As such, the configuration file does not exist on a fresh deploy.

I created some tasks to stop, start and restart Sphinx using the rake commands that come with Thinking Sphinx. One problem I ran into right away was the absence of the config/production.sphinx.conf file that’s expected when you run the thinking_sphinx:start task. Luckily, there’s another rake task called thinking_sphinx:configure which re-creates the configuration file without performing a full index.

While there is a thinkning_sphinx:restart task, that doesn’t give me the opportunity to re-create the config file prior to starting Sphinx up again.

  desc "Stop the sphinx server"
  task :stop_sphinx , :roles => :app do
    run "cd #site/atom && rake thinking_sphinx:stop RAILS_ENV=production"
  end
    
  desc "Start the sphinx server" 
  task :start_sphinx, :roles => :app do
    run "cd #site/atom && rake thinking_sphinx:configure RAILS_ENV=production && rake thinking_sphinx:start RAILS_ENV=production"
  end
  
  desc "Restart the sphinx server"
  task :restart_sphinx, :roles => :app do
    stop_sphinx
    start_sphinx
  end  

Restarting the App

Now that the Sphinx tasks are there, you just have to update the applications’s :restart task to restart Sphinx when you restart your app.

  desc "Restart mongrel"
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    restart_sphinx
    sudo restart_mongrel
  end

A full version of the example deploy.rb is pastied.