Using Underscore's chaining syntax, you can cut down on the cognitive load of working in a mixed-library environment.

As part of my work, I often create prototypes of Rails applications. My preferred tool for doing this is Serve. But as excellent as it is, it's a very thin application with no persistence layer. To be honest, I don't really want a persistence layer at this stage. But there are times when I want to be able to iterate over collections of objects the same way that I would in a Rails environment. Creating an index view of subscribers is a great example.

This past weekend I participated in Hack the Midwest, a Kansas City hackathon. The event was a huge success drawing a crowd of around 100 developers. As one of the visiting developer evangelists said, it was a great turnout for a New York hackathon, much less one in the midwest.

At the competition I built Qup.tv, a simple service that will send you email alerts when Netflix adds new titles to its streaming catalog. I was lucky enough to win top honors at the event, but this wasn't my first rodeo. With three Rails Rumbles, two Node Knockouts, and a Startup Weekend under my belt I'm beginning to get a sense of what works and what doesn't. So here's my list of things to keep in mind when competing in a hackathon:

Ted O'Meara departs today for Salt Lake City, Utah where he'll spend the next few days immersed in the ever-evolving community of Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. He's headed for destination: MountainWest RubyConf.

Ted came to Intridea two years ago as a designer and in just a short time he's proven to be a dextrous and pioneering leader. Not only has he become an accomplished project manager, he also plunged into the development world in an effort to become a more knowledgable and powerful designer. He did it. He crossed the streams.

One of my favorite aspects of Ruby is that just about everything is an object, even Class and Module. The ability to instantiate "anonymous" classes and modules can give you a great deal of power and help you out in situations where you otherwise might not have a clean solution.

What do Anonymous Things Look Like?

Anonymous classes and modules are just like other classes and modules but a little different. This can be seen best by example:

As a QA Manager who often oversees more than a dozen projects at a time across both client/services side and internal/product side development I get an inside look at what helps projects succeed. Today I’m pulling my head out of the depths of QA Land to give you an important tip that’s been rattling around my brain cage for the last couple of weeks:

The squeaky wheel gets the grease

In other words, speak up. And keep speaking up until something is fixed.

Now I know that proverbs are silly to use since many of them are so contradictory: “good things come to those who wait”, right? Listen up folks — in the world of software development, good things do not come to those who wait. In fact, waiting around does absolutely nothing except tank your chances for successful delivery and implementation.

You might think there's not really anything to being a good user of open source. Install the library, use it how you need it, and move on. And honestly, for the most part that's a fine thing to do. But if you want to be more than one of the silent users, if you want to help the projects you use just by using them, there are lots of ways to do it. You could become a vital part of pushing forward your favorite open source projects without ever altering a single line of code.

As someone who has both attended and instructed many 2-5 days classes on programming topics, I’ve come to understand there are certain things teachers can do to make classes more useful and enjoyable.

Here are 12 tips to keep in mind when creating and teaching a technical course:

In the second post in the series on “Why Your Company Needs a Rails Shop”, we’re talking about the “first-mover advantage" and how outsourcing your development to a Rails company can get your product to market quicker.

What’s The Big Idea?

You’ve got a great idea. You know it’s great because you’ve done objective market research, talked to your target customers and made an effort to understand your competition. Now you need to get your product some legs of its own. Getting your product to market as soon as possible can be critical to the success of your initiative. The web is rich with the innovations of passionate people; the landscape is competitive. You have no time to spare.

Our developers tend to have interesting conversations throughout the day in Socialspring Stream, our communication and collaboration application. It occurred to me today that it would make sense to take some of the useful tidbits of information that surface there and share them with the rest of the development community! After all, the conversations are captured already - all I need to do is bundle up the relevant bits of information and serve them to you via our blog; in other words, expect more quick posts of tips and tricks here!

When I was developing the Presently Android client I ran into an interesting problem. If a user is in the main timeline activity and a new message comes in, the active timeline just needs to update with the new message. However, if the user is in another activity stream, (like viewing @ replies or DM's for example) and a new message comes in to the main stream the application should not only update the main stream but should also show the user a notification so they can be aware that new messages are coming into another activity.

In this post I will show you I solved this problem.

We know there is an Application class in the Android api and according to the class name, it's used for global settings or running entrance. What does it to do for an application? I will dive into it in this blog post.

In the Android reference it describes the Application class: "Base class for those who need to maintain global application state. You can provide your own implementation by specifying its name in your AndroidManifest.xml's tag, which will cause that class to be instantiated for you when the process for your application/package is created."

It's been close to a year since Rails 3 came out and I've had the pleasure of working on several Rails 3 projects since its release. Some existing gems became irrelevant with the release of Rails 3, while others lived. Additionally, we've seen many new gems come to life. I'd like to share a stack of gems that I've been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.

Most of these gems have good documentation on their project wiki (every great gem should be well documented, right?), so I won't go into great detail about the mechanics. Instead, my aim is to introduce you to some of the gems I find most useful and separate them into meaningful categories, as a sort of reference guide.

It’s been nearly a year since the release of the iPhone 4, and much to the dismay of the tech community, it’s still the only product in the Apple lineup with a high pixel density ‘Retina’ display. While the much-hyped feature drew universal praise when the device was unveiled, some were wondering the following:

No matter what level of developer you are, at some point you will have the underrated joy of inheriting a legacy software project. And since we're fortunate enough to work in such a fast-paced community and ecosystem, "legacy" really encapsulates any piece of software more than a week or two old. Often though, we don't have time to appreciate how our ancestors used to write Ruby back in the days of Rails 2.3, or even (gasp) 2.1 — we need to get right to work. It's at this point that the nefarious Jabberwocky method can rear its ugly head.

In Blackberry Java application development, every row in ListField has the default blue focus highlight color. There is no simple setter to change it. One way to change it is to overwrite the 'drawFocus' method. I'm going to walk you through the steps to change that.

If you've upgraded to the recently released jQuery 1.5, you may have heard about the fancy new AJAX facilities that allow you to define things in novel ways.

On a recent project when I was using the BetterNestedSet plugin to manage a large hierarchal set of data, I encountered a problem that required me to find all of the items in a nested set that had children and those that didn't. In nested set terms I wanted: all 'parent' nodes and all 'leaf' nodes that exist within the 'tree'.

If you want to do this through the current BetterNestedSet interface you might be tempted to do something like this: