Archive for April, 2010
Week 136
Apr 30th
It seems like it’s time to give this another go.
With justinian and the Greenbelt relaunch over, this week has continued along the lines of the rest of April with a return to juggling a whole host of smaller projects.
Work for the James Lind Library continues apace, and while we’re still some way off the full overhaul we’re dreaming of there’s now a set of content management tools in place that will let us prepare the library for that day. It’s been quite a process of mapping, deconstructing and reconstructing the content, and while there’s plenty more of that to do we’ve got enough of a grasp that our guesses of how to move forward are now of the informed variety.
There’s also a very exciting project for a record label I’ve admired for quite a while. It’s been a rush job, but it’s shaping up well and should launch on Tuesday. More on that next week.
One of the fun parts of these small projects is that they’ve been a chance to work with rails 3 and it’s delightful how far it’s come in the past few months. When I was playing with it over Christmas everything felt a little creaky, but with a few more months work and a lot more plugins ported over, it all feels a lot more solid. In fact, by the middle of next week I should have two or three rails 3 apps in production and an equal number in active development. The speed-ups, new query finders and increased modularisation have all been working out well.
Alongside all of that, there’s been a fair bit of chasing my accountant to try and get last year’s accounts wrapped up, and talking to people about potential new projects. I had a great meeting last Friday with a renowned arts festival that quickly expanded from a very straightforward brief into some much more exciting possibilities, and am just about to start work with an east london arts charity who needed someone to step in and pick up a particularly complex app. Lots of exciting stuff on the horizon, but still more to juggle. I’m quite looking forward to the long weekend.
(by the way, we do still have another desk available in our Shoreditch office. drop me a line if you’d like to join us)
Chris Wanstrath on Github
Apr 19th
Obie Fernandez has a nice interview with Chris Wanstrath of Github up on InfoQ. Github continues to be fascinating, both the company as a startup and the product as a change to how people interact with and around code.
From the interview, I particularly like the sound of their hiring practices, which have so far seemed very focussed on new employees’ community engagement and potential to bring new ideas to the table.
Faster Rails development with bundler and rvm
Apr 18th
If you’re anything like me, you’ve found the rails server and console taking longer and longer to launch lately. Even switching to Rails 3 for most active projects hasn’t really helped. But I finally found a solution a couple of weeks ago.
I found it reading Mikel Lindsaar’s Bundle Me Some Sanity where he outlines the way that bundler coupled with rvm allows a rather different and much cleaner way to manage gems in a ruby application.
I’d been aware of rvm as a way to cleanly manage different versions of ruby on a single machine, but had missed their (recent addition in 0.1.25 of) Named Gem Sets. With Named Gem Sets you can specify a version of ruby and a separate gem library for each app, reducing dependency resolution time considerably.
I already can’t imagine switching away from this.
Creatives, whether people or cities
Apr 18th
Adam Greenfield’s shared some thoughts in advance of his talk for the World Congress on Information Technology:
People are creative; industries, not so much. And cities?.
The sprawling cohort Florida anoints as creative for the purposes of making his case have so little in common otherwise that it’s hard to ever imagine them constituting a coherent constituency, voting bloc, market or audience.
I also wish somebody would tell me just which fields of human endeavor constitute these supposed “creative industries.” The laundry list of criteria that have been advanced strikes me as more self-congratulatory than diagnostically useful…
I’ve been bothered for some time by uses (inspired by Richard Florida or not) of “creatives” that seem to imply a group set apart who garner some special set of entitlements. [Such thinking was particularly clear in the twitter chatter about the Digital Economy Bill a couple of weeks ago]. Adam nails some of that here, coupling it with the usual sensible thinking about urban policy.