Blog posts

My officemate Matt has spent the past few weeks putting together the inaugural History Hack Day, which took place at the Guardian offices last weekend. I was only able to attend for the kick-off talks, but they were great, with Matt Sheret’s exhortation to be timelords fitting especially well. Jeremy Keith has done a great job of writing up the various hacks that emerged from the weekend and I’m gradually working my way through them. I’ve very much enjoyed watching Simon’s geStation which plots the openings of Britain’s railway stations onto a google map. As Jeremy says: ...

Last Monday I was at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to explore the government’s “Tech City” scheme to do something to do with the technology industry in an area loosely defined as “East London”. I’d been wondering before sitting down to write this how best to sum up my reservations about the scheme, not really realising that just writing that first sentence would actually begin to draw them out quite quickly. An initiative has been announced, a name has been given, but very few people seem to actually be sure what is being proposed, or where or at whom it’s targeted. That made it very hard to work out how to engage with the event. ...

One of the projects that occupied the latter half of my 2010 was the build and launch of News Sauce. It’s an aggregator product that we’ve built on drupal and initially launched to pull together news coming out of the UK government. It’s been ticking along very nicely for a couple of months now and has been very well received. Which is nice. Over the weekend there was a little surge of attention as a result of UK Gov Camp and that prompted me to write a blog entry I’ve been promising for a couple of months. So if you want to know a little more about the tech behind the site you can now find my first notes over on the News Sauce blog. ...

I’ve been musing on Mike Kuniavsky’s notes from his Microsoft Social Computing Symposium for a few days. While his focus is ostensibly on physical products and our focus remains very much on web products it’s a helpful read since that distinction is an increasingly flexible one. because these things are now connected, their value moves from the device to the service it represents, and the actual objects become secondary. They become what I call service avatars. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice place to run a high res Flickr widget, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr widget on the road. People see “through” each device to the service it represents, devaluing the device to nearly nothing. ...

Adding Actions to Devise Controllers It wasn’t the most fun I could imagine having during a “holiday season” but while holed up in Chicagoland over Christmas I spent a couple of days porting a few of my older Rails apps to use a more up to date stack: Rails 3, Devise, Inherited Resources, Formtastic, etc. The idea is that if the apps are on a stack I use every day, I’ll spend less of my time reloading old tools into my head when the inevitable tweaks are required. We’ll see how that goes. ...

A few months back I set out to port theme_support (my rails plugin to allow one app to serve different views under various conditions) to Rails 3. I got some basics working, but realised along the way that it was well overdue for a complete rewrite. And then I got busy with projects that didn’t use theme_support and the rewrite was left lingering. With Rails 3’s official release a few weeks back I began getting a few requests for an updated version. Without time to do the plugin justice, I suggested people fork the project and submit patches. I’m very pleased to say that Lucas Florio took that and ran with it. The result is a new gem: themes_for_rails. ...

This is always a strange week in my annual calendar. So much of my work is focussed around Greenbelt—which is now less than a week away—that many, many projects are approaching their culmination. Good news this week is that we’ve got a little of the funding we need for this year’s newspaper, that the GPD is once again paying off as preparations to sell talks online were easier by several orders of magnitude than any time in the past decade, and that the festival iPhone app was approved and is now on sale. ...

A calmer week at last. I tend to find that I’m especially prone to procrastination in weeks like this one, when there’s finally some breathing room after an intense period. I guess that’s okay, but it can lead to nasty surprises. It’s largely been a week of “tidying up”. We got a whole range of small fixes made to a range of client sites and deployed them for testing. That led to some server wrangling, and in one case to lots of back-and-forth with a client’s internal IT person as we tried to figure out their rather complex Windows/IIS server setup and an awkward API that required an interface script be placed at a very specific URL. ...

I’ve been setting monit up to keep an eye on the various parts associated with a Rails app (2.3.x but patched to use Bundler for gem management) and ran into a problem getting my Gemfile recognised properly. The essential piece I’d missed was the BUNDLE_GEMFILE environment variable. So for, say, delayed_job what was needed was: start program = "/usr/bin/env RAILS_ENV=production BUNDLE_GEMFILE=/var/www/my_app/current/Gemfile PATH=/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH /var/www/my_app/current/script/delayed_job start" Hopefully that’ll save someone a few minutes.

Another week down and once again I can’t quite remember what was achieved. Uppermost in my mind is a client meeting from Wednesday that seemed very positive – everyone on the same page, clear targets and achievable (if tight) deadlines – but was shortly followed by an email that threw the whole project into confusion. The coming week will require that we resolve that. There’s a new look in place for the the Ninja XX site that better fits with the print design they’ve recently had completed. The arrangements for our increasingly popular office are tidied up. My team of Greenbelt volunteers are all in place and the Programming Database we built for them is churning out contracts, saving people lots of time. We have Suite 4 in progress. Our new standard Ts&Cs are being finalised by the solicitor. Other projects are moving along. I’ve begun on plans to hand others over to new teams who could drive them forward over a longer term. ...