David Eisinger

Another Thing I Made: WorldWildlife.org

2013-02-02T22:08:31Z

Last year, I had the priviledge of working with a talented team at Viget to build and launch a new site for the North American branch of the World Wildlife Fund:

This was the first major project at Viget for which I served as technical lead from start to finish. I’m very proud of the way it turned out, particularly the custom content management system we built and the photo management tools. I wrote a few posts on our company tech blog if you’d like to read more:

A Thing I Made: PUMA.com

2011-07-08T03:30:45Z

I’ve been working for PUMA (the shoe company) at Viget for about the last year and a half, developing a content management system (CMS) to drive several of their category marketing sites (including Running, Football, and Golf). In March of this year, we began modifying the platform to drive not just these category sites but the PUMA homepage, as well. I’m proud to say that, as of March 20, our software, written in Ruby, is serving www.puma.com.

It was a great experience, working with a team of talented user-experience and visual designers, front-end developers, and fellow Ruby guys, not to mention project managers who held it all together. In technical terms, we were able to make heavy use of Redis to speed up page load times and cache the countless API responses that drive the site. I’m happy to report that, all humbleness aside, the site is screaming fast.

If you’d like to hear more about the PUMA project, some of the team members and I will be speaking at this month’s Refresh the Triangle on July 28.

New Site: davidmade.com

2011-02-07T04:33:46Z

I’ve been working on a small site for posting shorter-form writing and music recordings which I’ve called Davidmade. I was using Tumblr for a bit, but I’ve wanted to build a static site generator for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. In many ways, this is exactly what I was envisioning for GitWrite, the Rails Rumble project I worked on last year. No web interface, just a simple script to generate HTML from a collection of templates that gets run whenever I do a push.

Eventually, I’d love to do all my online writing using this system, but for now it’s just lighter stuff. The full source (including code and content) is available on GitHub, so if this sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can fork it and get a local version running in a few seconds.

Rails Rumble 2010: GitWrite

2010-10-23T20:10:29Z

Last weekend, I participated in the Rails Rumble for the third year in a row with fellow Vigeteers Matt Henry, Chris Jones, and Clinton Nixon. Our app, GitWrite, is billed as “blogging for nerds, done right.” It’s a pretty neat concept — sign up with your GitHub account and give us your public key, and we create blog backed by a repository that you can push to in order to make updates.

Unlike past Rumbles, where I’ve spent the weekend heads down in TextMate, I wrote very little code this time around, instead handling the team’s design duties. I really enjoyed working a different part of my brain, though it was frustrating that all the keyboard shortcuts I used to rely on are long gone from my memory. To my surprise, the design has received high marks from a bunch of the judges, which is flattering to say the least.

GitWrite did really well in the expert judging phase, receiving a perfect score from one of our judges. It entered open judging in third place, though it’s since fallen to around fifteenth. We were targeting a certain type of user with this app, and the comments reflect this: for every “this is nerdy and awesome,” there’s a “stupid” (no really, that’s the full text of one comment).

I’m not sure what the future of GitWrite is — the concept seems to have legs, but we’ll need to go back and reengineer a few things if we want to build a lasting product. In any event, I had a great time working with the guys and I’m super proud of what we were able to accomplish. If nothing else, it’s always nice to get written up in TechCrunch.

The Gift & the Curse

2010-08-26T01:15:37Z

Last week, my sister and I took a road trip across the American southwest, moving her from her temporary home in Burbank, CA to College Station, TX for grad school. It was a great time — visiting the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and Carlsbad Caverns among several other destinations, and a lot of hanging out that we don’t get as much time to do as we get older.

We’re both happy iPhone owners, and we made heavy use of them on the trip. They got us all the way to Texas with next to no preparation, just a general route and a hotel for the very first night. From there, we pulled up our directions on the fly and booked our hotels hours before pulling into town, using Yelp and hotels.com to find the best places and prices. I didn’t bring my fancy Nikon, but instead used the Hipstamatic app to take vintage-looking photos that I could upload from the road. And the iPhone came up huge when I didn’t realize there were two airports in Houston, and had to direct us all the way across the city in order to catch my flight home.

On the other hand, I spent my vacation checking Twitter, a more-or-less harmless vice, though a few tweets did cause me a bit of heartburn. What’s worse, though, is that I’ve got my phone connected to my personal and work email accounts, and couldn’t resist checking those, as well. I was able to catch a server outage and restart it with my sister’s laptop, so that’s a win by some definition, but at what cost? There were a few occasions where we needed to book a hotel, but the signal wasn’t strong enough to reliably surf the web, leading to several frustrated hours that would have been avoided by booking these things in advance.

I know this is the mother of all white whines, that the supercomputer in my pocket is removing my ability to disconnect from my rottenly spoiled life, but it strikes me as remarkable what an overall neutral force technology was on the whole trip, despite how many aspects of the trip it touched. If I could do it again, would I leave the iPhone home? I’d love to, but I’m not sure I could.