David Eisinger

TheCoffeeLog, My Rails Rumble App

2009-08-29T15:29:29Z

Last weekend, I participated in the Rails Rumble, a 48-hour web application creation competition (and thus ends the rhyming portion of today’s entry) for the second year in a row. This year, my teammates and I wanted to build something simple, clean, and focused. In response to the stumbling blocks of many of last year’s attempts, we avoided requiring a large user base in order for our app to be useful and bypassed the traditional signup system. We decided on a simple feed reader that uses email as its primary interface. Users send the URLs they want to follow to a designated email address, and we send them their updates every morning. The app lives (and will continue to live) at http://thecoffeelog.com.

Participating in the Rumble this year was an incredible experience. I especially enjoyed getting the chance to work with former colleagues and building something that I hope will have value well beyond the competition. Major thanks to Mark and Clinton for their work streamlining the application and server setup processes.

Judging the Judging

For reasons I don’t quite grasp, the organizers decided to break the judging process into two phases for this year’s competition. All completed apps were to be graded by four members of the “Expert Panel,” after which the top twenty or so apps would go on to public voting. Our application only received three scores; our first two judges rated us highly, while the third gave us low marks across the board without leaving any commentary as to why.

Our application was certainly modest in scope compared to some of the other entries, so I didn’t expect us to win any prizes, but I’m frustrated that the same judge gave similarly low marks to Append — an app my friends made that I thought really had a chance at a top spot — again, without leaving any commentary or even signing up. I hope they continue to refine the judging process for next year; I think the expert panel should either be required to comment in order to leave scores or removed from the competition altogether.

Viget Extend Posts

2009-07-16T22:54:33Z

I know things are slow on this site, but it’s not as if I’ve given up writing online entirely. These days, I put my technical posts at Viget Extend, our development team blog. Here are a few of my posts from the past few months:

Getting (And Staying) Motivated to Code — my first attempt at a “soft” post.

Stop Pissing Off Your Designers — the follow-up post to the Refresh presentation I gave.

Out, Damned Tabs — how to rid your code of unwanted spacing.

Backup your Database in Git — like the title says. This one earned a good amount of discussion on Hacker News.

Simple APIs using SerializeWithOptions — a plugin I put together to cut the repetition out of building XML and JSON-based APIs in Rails.

Single-Use jQuery Plugins — published today! Write jQuery plugins to package up site behavior.

If you’re into Ruby on Rails or web development in general, there’s a lot of good stuff on the blog. And if you already read it, I promise this is the last self-promotional post of this decade. To the extent that having your own website isn’t inherently entirely self-promotional, adverbially speaking.

RubyNation PresenTation

2009-06-01T11:00:00Z

I’m taking my Optimizing Perceived Performance show on the road for the RubyNation conference, June 12-13 in Reston, VA, alongside three of my fellow Vigeteers. I’ve been busy revising the talk to include material from High Performance Web Sites, by Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow, as well as information about relevant updates coming in Rails 3.

The first time I gave the talk, I had to switch back-and-forth between Keynote and the web app I built, which made for a somewhat jerky experience. This time around, I’m creating a jQuery-based presentation framework to show slides and code, and then, within the same browser window, execute the code and demonstrate its effects. My goal is to create NOTHING LESS than the premiere browser-based system for giving presentations about unobtrusive javascript. Check out the content and the jQuery plugin that runs the show.

I’ve also submitted the talk to Windy City Rails, taking place in Chicago in September. I’ve wanted to visit Chicago since the last time I visited Chicago, in 1989.

UPDATE 6/5: Accepted to Windy City Rails!

O Hai Tad

2009-05-28T13:10:51Z

About two weeks ago, this little guy showed up on Craigslist. I drove out to Cary to meet him that Saturday, and it was love at first site. His former owners called him Blooper, but we unburdened him of that as soon as we got into the car. Tad is a six-month old blue quaker parrot of indeterminate gender, but he’s a boy until I’m told otherwise. Here we are:

Tad loves cheerios and peanut butter and especially cheerios covered in peanut butter. He can say “peekaboo” if prodded about 70 times. His former owners clipped his wings, which isn’t something I plan to keep up with, but for now we’ve been enjoying hanging out in the courtyard next to my apartment. He shits everywhere. Keep up with our adventures with this Flickr set I created.

Site Redesign: Misanthropy and the City

2009-04-02T05:24:26Z

Before she left to travel around the world in 2007, I helped my sister set up a website to chronicle her various adventures. Two years later, the site was looking a little dated, so we decided to completely overhaul it. She did some drawings (in her distinctive style), and I turned them into a new skin for her existing Textpattern setup. The new site, Misanthropy and the City, is now live, and I’m pleased — nay, delighted — with how it turned out.

It was great to have an excuse to work in Photoshop and Illustrator. There was a time when I wanted to do this stuff professionally, and though I love the development side of web work, it felt good to use some of those skills for the first time in years. Putting this redesign together has made me appreciate the work the designers at Viget do that much more; I can’t imagine doing this kind of visually creative work 8-10 hours a day.

Have a look around the new site, and let me know what you think. And if it’s broken in IE, I do not care.