Kyle Slattery

My Paris Photos on Flickr

Mon, 09 May 2011 03:48:00 -0400

Wow, almost 5 months since I last posted. That’s…sad. But, anyways, I’m in Paris until July, working at my new job. I recently bought a new camera, so I’ll be posting photos pretty regularly on Flickr. The Flickr Import on my site is broken at the moment (and I’m not sure if it’s worth fixing), so they won’t be appearing in this RSS feed.

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Ruby Hash Tricks

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:11:00 -0500

Some really cool tricks with Ruby hashes–if you supply a block to Hash.new, that will act as a default value for a given key. For example, here’s a Fibonacci hash I put together which caches the values (making it pretty quick):

fibonacci = Hash.new do |h,k|
  if k < 2
    h[k] = k
  else
    h[k] = h[k-1] + h[k-2]
  end
end

fibonacci[6]   # => 8
fibonacci[100] # => 354224848179261915075

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The Official Viddler Ruby Gem

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:10:00 -0500

I just announced our new Ruby gem over on the Viddler blog. It’s a fairly basic wrapper for our v2 API for now, but I definitely have plans for some really cool features, like having ActiveModel compatible classes for stuff like videos, playlists, users, etc., as well as making it easy to integrate into existing ActiveRecord models in Rails.

So, if you’re into Ruby and you’re looking for a way to integrate video into your site, definitely check us out. We have a really great API, and now that there’s an official gem, it’s easier than ever to get started.

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Ajax Upload

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:14:00 -0400

This looks like a nice alternative to Flash-based uploaders like Uploadify:

This plugin uses XHR for uploading multiple files with progress-bar in FF3.6+, Safari4+, Chrome and falls back to hidden iframe based upload in other browsers, providing good user experience everywhere.

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What technologies are geeks pioneering today?

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:54:00 -0400

Marco Arment:

Even geeks (like us) have their limits of reasonability. At some point, we often decide that what we’ve been doing or what we think we should enjoy just isn’t worthwhile.

Marco absolutely nails it with this. I used to be all about building custom computers, but nowadays, I’d much rather buy a MacBook Pro that just works, because the extra aggravation of maintaining my own system just isn’t worth the price difference any more.

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Requiring SSL Using Route Constraints in Rails 3

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:31:00 -0400

The new router in Rails 3 makes it super easy to require SSL for certain routes. Just use the following in your config/routes.rb:

MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
  class SslConstraint
    def self.matches?(request)
      request.ssl?
    end
  end

  scope :constraints => SslConstraint do
    resources :payments
    # Other SSL routes go in here
  end
end

Now, this is a pretty simple example–you’ll likely want to also have routes to redirect if a user tries to access without SSL, but it definitely shows off the power of the new router.

GitHub Introduces Organizations

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:56:00 -0400

This is just awesome. Prices feel a little high (for private repositories, the plans start at $100/mo), but if you’re a business that needs this, you’re likely able to afford it.

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Install LAMP stack from source with Homebrew

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:51:00 -0400

A quick tutorial on installing PHP from source using Homebrew. I needed to recompile PHP and could not get things to work, until Ben Bleikamp pointed me towards Homebrew, and this tutorial worked great. One thing to note: the tutorial is a bit out of date, as it uses newer versions of the software, so make sure to check the versions in the commands. For me, I had to change this line:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/php52/5.2.12/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.2.so

I updated it to 5.2.13:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/php52/5.2.13/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.2.so

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Gruber's Google I/O Thoughts

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:16:00 -0400

The big loser this week, though, was Microsoft. They’re simply not even part of the game. RIM looms large, as BlackBerrys continue to reign as the best-selling smartphones in the U.S. But Microsoft? They’ve got nothing. No interesting devices, weak sales, and a shrinking user base. Microsoft’s irrelevance is taken for granted.

As usual, John Gruber nails it. Microsoft really has no chance at catching up with either Apple or Google at this point, and it’s pretty stunning. They entered the game way too late, and, as far as I know, it’s still going to be a while before the first Windows Phone 7 handsets come out. They’ve already lost the mobile war.

However, as Gruber mentions, things between Apple and Google are getting very interesting. While I admittedly have not been all that satisfied with my Droid experience so far, it’s a promising platform, and I really love how much Google is pushing cloud technology. A cell phone should operate completely separate from a computer, and that’s something Apple just hasn’t done right yet.

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Photos of Space Shuttle Atlantis' Final Launch

Fri, 14 May 2010 22:42:00 -0400

The end of an era. It will be a sad day when the final space shuttle mission is completed.

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Lazy Loading Asynchronous Javascript

Fri, 07 May 2010 22:00:00 -0400

A great summary of how to build a non-blocking JS widget.

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Using Git Branches as Patches

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:29:00 -0400

At Viddler, we’re now using Git for projects, and it’s going really well so far. While we haven’t figured out the perfect workflow just yet, we’re doing some things I really like, and one of them is treating branches like patches.

Often, people think of Git branches as a full copy of the parent branch, but it’s better to treat them as a simple collection of new commits, to be applied to the parent branch later. This might not seem too revolutionary, but this small change in thinking can really improve your workflow.

For example, at Viddler we use Trac to manage tickets, and in Git. For each ticket in Trac, we create a branch, called something like 3241-fix-embed-codes. We have two permanent branches: dev, which reflects current development, and master, which is considered always production-ready. So, dev and master are going to have different code to reflect their reflective stability. To get started with a fix, we first create a feature branch from master:

git checkout -b 3241-fix-embed-codes master

This simply creates a new branch of master called 3241-fix-embed-codes and checks it out. When the ticket is completed and the code has been committed, the patch thinking really comes into play. Since this now needs to be tested in the dev environment, the branch first gets applied to the dev branch:

git checkout dev
git merge —no-ff 3241-fix-embed-codes

Using the —no-ff option on git merge is important for this patch mindset: it creates a separate commit for the merge itself, which allows you to git revert the entire thing (if necessary), rather than having to undo each individual commit within it.

Once we’ve decided this fix is read for production, it’s time to move the code over to master. Without the patch mindset, you might consider merging dev into master, but that means you’d be copying anything that’s applied to dev, some of which might not yet be ready. When you think of your feature branch as a patch, however, it’s easy to only apply the one you need. To apply this patch to master, just use a similar method as before:

git checkout master
git merge &#45;-no-ff 3241-fix-embed-codes

Now you’ve only moved the safe commits over, leaving any buggy code safely in dev.

This method may seem obvious, but the mindset has really changed the way I use Git, and I think it makes it a much more powerful tool, especially when you’re working across multiple environments (like production and staging). I’ve skipped over some additional considerations, like merging master/dev into your feature branch, but those are topics for a future post.