Sometimes... stuff happens

"They sound a little tired and frustrated, don’t they? That’s the sound of legacy code."

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 10:04:03 -0500

“They sound a little tired and frustrated, don’t they? That’s the sound of legacy code.”

- Giles Bowkett - Rails as She is Spoke

Tech-Angels: Gemfile trick for github repositories

Fri, 11 May 2012 11:16:26 -0400

Tech-Angels: Gemfile trick for github repositories:

tech-angels:

Tired of writing long git paths to github repositories in Gemfile? Then you will find this useful. When the repository you need is public, you can use :github shortland instead of :git. And just specify github username and repository name separated by slash.

If repository name and username…

The Last Train

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:54:00 -0500

“No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth.” — Robert Southey

It occurred to me that once I stepped onto the train this morning it will be my last time for what will probably be quite a while. Moving to a new state at the end/beginning of a year really drives the point home. There is a definite feeling of closure and new opportunity.

That got me thinking about my journey ahead and how I ended up at this point. I’d like to thank the people around me that helped define who I am in my career path.

It pretty much started with myself and a pirated copy of Agile Web Development that led me to find others interested in Ruby programming. It was a tough time but that is when I stumbled into Ray Hightower leading a Ruby Meetup in a library meeting room. Thanks Ray, my involvement in ChicagoRuby, I feel, is what really moved my career into the fast path.

Next up is Dave Giunta, Courtney Braafhart, and Jim Hassan who believed in me enough to take a chance and give me my first full-time Ruby dev position. Thanks… I was crazy nervous trying to play it cool in my interview (with my pinstripe suit). This is also where I met Adam Walters, Chris Hallendy and Stephen Korecky. Who have become good friends and I’m always learning from each of them.

This is about where I attended an Obtiva TDD Bootcamp taught by one Dave Hoover. Dave must have been semi impressed with me cause he asked if I was interested in trying out for Obtiva shortly after that. Of course I jumped at the chance to work along side people I looked up to in the dev community. So thanks Dave Hoover, Kevin Taylor, Todd Webb and Kat Reid. That quadruple interview was intense and I know I bombed Kevin’s interview but again… thanks for believing in me.

I can say that once I started with Obtiva it was Noel Rappin, Joe Banks, and Chad Pry that really put up with me and taught me to become a half way decent dev.

Now my journey continues to Florida to join the Hashrocket family. It is my honor to be a small part of another great dev shop. So thank you, Hashrocket, for taking me on and letting me continue this crazy career path I’ve set myself on.

To all who were mentioned and those that were not… thanks for the friendship and experiences. They will not be forgotten.

Minimal Mac: No Daddy

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:21:08 -0500

Minimal Mac: No Daddy:

minimalmac:

So, the Internet is shaking with the power of ten thousand wagging fingers over Go Daddy’s support of SOPA, the evil legislation that threatens everything we know and hold dear about the ‘verse. It is even so evil that it threatens the things we don’t care about too.

I have never used Ho Daddy…

Initialize those Settings

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:23:38 -0400

When starting a Rails project you will generally start loading in your ‘goto’ gems. You know, the ones that you are familar with and provide quick value for you and your project.

One of these for me is settingslogic. This has always been one of my first setup steps. This gem is great. It allows you to set your application settings in a YAML file and then gain access to that data in normal ruby object method calling syntax.

ex: Settings.aws.secret

Cool… now we’re on the same page. It’s a pretty simple gem to set up to boot! Just add it to your Gemfile to get started.

In my example above I was using a Settings constant. Let’s get that created. In an initializer I would create a file settings.rb.

ex: config/initializers/settings.rb

class Settings < Settingslogic
  source "#{Rails.root}/config/settings.yml"
  namespace Rails.env
end

That was easy! We’re just telling Settingslogic where to look for our config file and how to figure out different namespaces. Namespacing is key here because it allows us to have different setting entries based on environment. Now you are able to enter test keys for your payment gateway instead of the live production keys.

ex: config/settings.yml

defaults: &defaults
  use_online_storage?: false
  aws:
    access_key: longstringofchars
    secret: supersecret
    bucket: immabee-usin-settingslogic

development:
  <<: *defaults

test:
  <<: *defaults

production:
  <<: *defaults
  use_online_storage?: true

Now the fun part… lets use this bad dog. Say I want to upload some files using the fantastic Carrierwave gem. This is about how your settings would look like.

ex: config/initializers/carrierwave.rb

CarrierWave.configure do |config|
  config.fog_credentials = {
    provider: 'AWS',
    aws_access_key_id: Settings.aws.access_key,
    aws_secret_access_key: Settings.aws.secret
  }
  config.fog_directory = Settings.aws.bucket
end

Notice how I’m just gaining access to my settings via the Settings constant using what appears to be method chaining? Pretty cool, right? This is not really a new concept, I just think Settingslogic encapsulates this functionality well.

If you peek back up at our settings.yml, you should notice that the method chaining maps cleanly to the nesting of the YAML file… easy peasy.

That’s pretty much it. Now, funny thing, the reason I started writing this article was to show you some tips I found valuable. Thought I should set up the article with an overview of Settingslogic so we’re all on the same page.

If you had the above code implemented and tried to start your server or console you will most likely hit a brick wall. By chance you were following along… this may look familiar:

uninitialized constant Settings (NameError)

Gross, right? What the hell is it talking about? If you were to use the Settings constant anywhere else in your app this would probably not be a problem. This issue has to do with the order in which files are getting loaded in our app. We’re trying to use Settings before it has been evaluated.

I hit this wall a lot because a lot of times the reason I want to use this method is to cleanse my initializers of data points that shouldn’t be stored as part of my app like various api keys.

Rails loads initializers top down in alphabetical order. This should be no surprise that the ‘s’ in settings.rb is coming after the ‘c’ in carrierwave.rb. ‘That sucks!’, you say? The fix is pretty simple, you just need to think out of the box a little. Just rename your settings.rb file to _settings.rb. This now reorders its place in the alphabetical listing and allows the Settings constant to get loaded before your other initializers.

Hooray, settings goodness can now be had by all!

Daughter 1: which one is that?

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:53:09 -0400

Daughter 1: which one is that?
Me: uranus
Daughter 2: I know my anus.

"Anything that plays in the forties or fifties and i’m there. Actually I wish i was born back..."

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:26:11 -0400

“Anything that plays in the forties or fifties and i’m there. Actually I wish i was born back then. That was a great era. Except the lack of Twitter. That makes me be like “Eh, never mind”. But if the forties and fifties had Twitter, I’d be like “YES, put me there… hashtag Gee Willikers”.”

- Ryan Connolly

Video

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 08:53:48 -0400

Digging for XPath Treasure using Chrome

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:41:28 -0400

I was never a fan of using XPath in my cucumber step definitions… mostly because I didn’t really understand how it worked.

Recently I had the chance to work with some people that use XPath way more than I do and I extracted this nugget of info from them. (Thanks John!)

You can use $x in the Chrome javascript console. No extensions needed.

$x("//img")

I’ve seen a few questions on StackOverflow about this and all the answers related to installing a chrome extension. I thought it was definitely worth writing down.

RVM Ruby Install on Lion Got You Down?

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:18:37 -0400

After a fresh install of OSX Lion, RVM decided no more of my ruby friends could come over and play. So I was all like “what’s up, RVM… y u no like my ruby exchange students anymore?”

Turns out Lion made some changes to what default compiler is getting used which makes building ruby via RVM unhappy. After some searching, the fine folks over at StackOverflow are full of win again.

Here is the solution that works for me:

CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc-4.2 rvm install <ruby version>

It was recommended that the CC variable declaration could be put in your profile reducing the need to enter it every time, but I’m uncomfortable just blindly making that change. If this is the only time I need to do this, I think I’m OK with it.

We are Family

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:08:00 -0400

For those of you who regularly read, or at least know me, know that I work/ed for a software development shop in Chicago called Obtiva. And if you knew that then you almost certainly know that Obtiva was recently acquired by Groupon.

Obtiva has a weekly get-together back at homebase called Geekfest. This is where everyone piles into one spot for some food and, more importantly, discussion about new technology, programming principals, or anything else that we’re interested in. Yesterday marked what may be the last Geekfest in its current iteration. I’m sure it will live on in a new home but that is a discussion for a different day. It seemed the perfect time to have a retrospective of Obtiva as a whole. Many things were said… some old, some fresh and new, some enlightening, and almost all humbling.

This is where my story begins…

Out of all the things that were said, to me, they all tied to a singularity. And that to me that was family. So I’d like to share with you what I shared with others yesterday.

Something I want to carry forward into our new adventures is the idea of family. Not necessarily my own little personal family where work/life balance comes into play but the family that is Obtiva. If you are from a large family like me then you already know that there are members you are close to, some that are more distant, and some that you may not care to interact with. At times everyone of us in that room can fit into one of those categories.

There are things that we share with each other that go beyond a work relationship. We share our triumphs and failures. We’ve laughed, been stressed, and have cried together. I know you guys have had my back for many moments during my time at Obtiva and you should know that I’ve got yours. I am comfortable saying that everyone in that room is my family.

I am scared that something like that could get lost in translation with a move to a larger company. I figure that you can only scale family so much before it becomes a community of strangers and that would be a HUGE loss.

This attribute of Obtiva has set the bar for me when looking at any other company, development related or not. If/when my time with Grouptiva comes to an end, this is THE quality that will be looked for and will make or break opportunities.

My name is Matt Polito and I have a hypenated last name of obtiva

We are obtiva… we are family.

Step Into My Breadbox, A Tale of Money Lost and Knowledge Gained

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 09:25:00 -0400

Before starting with Obtiva a bit ago, I started a toy project called Breadbox. It was a project started mostly out of necessity. At the time I was freelancing and didn’t want to pay a monthly rate for invoicing software, so I did what software devs do… I built it. The project evolved slightly as it started moving toward a platform that I could sell as a service myself. I thought I really had something going because at the time there wasn’t many players in that space besides Blinksale & Freshbooks. Unfortunatly, while I was plugging away at building my very own piece of software as a service history… some new players came around. There were many but the ones closes to my work were Ballpark & Curdbee.

Curdbee, I felt, was my biggest contendor as at the time they were closest in featureset and had the same idea of free/very low priced options. Although Ballpark frustrated the crap out of me. They had design to drool over and many features I had ‘invented’ in my head. I guess there probably isn’t a lot reinvention going on in the simple invoicing space but I thought they were good ideas and Ballpark was already on their way to implementation. This was frustrating but and I wanted to give up many times but kept plugging away.

Breadbox served my purposes well and I ate my own dogfood right up until today. I’ve realized that I just don’t have the time to put into the project anymore and would like to make sure you all know there is a decent project out there to dive into.

There are many reasons i’m writing to you today. The two main reasons are as follows.

I want Breadbox to have a good home. It has been been open-sourced for a while but I don’t really advertise that. I feel there is a good codebase of clean code and also many pitfalls, but I learned A LOT along the way. I’m hoping that some developer hunting for a project to work on might take a look and give Breadbox a little love

I want to share my experience with anyone that will listen. There are so many stories of success but hardly any of failure, or at the very least, failure to launch. Even though I did not attain my goal of launching a service to make some extra cash with, I gained a wealth of knowledge that as I look back was invaluable. So on the surface it may appear a failure, for me, it was a huge success. Devs in general, but mostly the more green developer, out there need to understand that there will be sooooo many projects that you start and throw away… and that’s OK. Throw them away and then start all over again. The nice thing about code is that you can always write it again with your newly gained experience.

I really love these action figure pictures

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 14:22:55 -0400

I really love these action figure pictures

This large building has sat abandoned since before I moved to...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:44:00 -0400

This large building has sat abandoned since before I moved to Elgin in 2006. Recently it had begun being dismantled. Although it was just an eyesore in the community I find something quite beautiful about these pictures.

Figured I would share.

Possible Solution to bundling ruby-debug19

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:51:00 -0400

In a previous article I posted a solution to ruby-debug19 not building when using rvm. Many people have found this helpful and I’d like to make it a little easier.

The solution I’ve found goes something like this

bundle config build.ruby-debug19 --with-ruby-include=<path to used ruby>

Now this should allow you to just run bundle install with no code puke but I don’t think I like it. I feel that doing this may be encroaching a bit on your team members development environment. In theory we should be using very similar development environments but in practice that doesn’t seem to be the case.

What do you think?

*** UPDATE 2 ***

You should probably just completely disregard this article for now, it must have been a fluke that it worked for me originally. I can no longer reproduce a successful result. Sorry for any misdirection.

*** UPDATE ***

This adds an entry to bundler config located in your $HOME directory. So if you’re using rvm, this may not be the greatest solution… depending on your environment. Still tell me what you think.

Tidly Bits of Knowledge, Shared by You

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:59:00 -0400

All right people, I’m going to share a little secret with you. Go ahead come a little closer so you can hear me, this is important. This may be somewhat of a shock to some of you but you’re smart. Yeah I said it, now deal with it. Oh, don’t give me the rolley eye. I know that you’re significant other along with your mother has been telling this to you for years. Go ahead and call them up now to thank them, they were right. (It’s ok, I can wait)

You back? Good.

To start off I’d like to reference a previous article from a while back. Don’t worry, I’m getting to the point. The beginning of this article may have seemed a little hand hold-ey… I’d like to think of it more like a virtual high five. That was all just to pump you up for this tidbit of information.

Like I was saying, you’re smart. If you’re like me you’re probably thinking that you’re not as smart as your peers or have as much to offer. This is not a bad thing… at least not for me. It’s what constantly drives me to become better. It turns out that you’ve already got the skills to offer your peers something.

I feel one of the best things you can do for yourself and your peers/community is to write down the tidbits of knowledge that are most likely trapped in your meat locker. This has been something that I try to keep up with and helps me CONSTANTLY. Also it’s an awesome tool for when you’re mind escapes for a shake break (SHAKE BREAK!). Just go ahead and search for that problem you’re having… Google and your past self probably got your back. Any blog you have will do just fine. I prefer Tumblr just due to me finding it easier to quickly get short form articles out there.

I’ve seen many benefits to this. You know what’s better than searching for a problem solution and finding that you’ve already wrote said solution? Your peers doing that same search and finding your solution. You just helped someone and that feels good. It’s even better when someone tells you they found your solution. Hey and sometimes there is a cherry on top… sometimes it’s someone that you look up to. Which brings us back to my rambling above about confidence.

There is something you know right now that the person doesn’t and quite possibly is having trouble with… RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW… you’re a smart dude/tte
RIGHT NOW… someone is in need of knowledge
RIGHT NOW… that person is next to you
RIGHT NOW… that person is in another country
RIGHT NOW… is harder than it looks
RIGHT NOW… you have the solution

Whoops, how’d Van Halen get in here… I don’t apologize for that.

I do, however, apologize for my rambling thought process. Hopefully I will have motivated you in some way to get tidbits of YOUR knowledge out there. Remember this does not need to be anything long form. I found that as a turn off initially but found that quick problem/solution articles worked for me. As an example, one of my more popular articles is a solution for ruby-debug19/linecache19.

When did Google start doing personalized birthday home pages?

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:48:32 -0400

When did Google start doing personalized birthday home pages?

Great poster by Noahrank

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:51:45 -0400

Great poster by Noahrank

Me: I'm not going to sit here and self diagnose you.

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 23:06:08 -0400

Me: I'm not going to sit here and self diagnose you.
Wife: Baby, that's what the Internet is for.

Flyin’ the air hog (Taken with picplz.)

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 09:31:05 -0400