Development

I wanted to make a quick note that I have been using RubyMotion the past few months. I don't mind building natively in Objective-C but since I have been coding both the app and the server side I found switching between Objective-C and Ruby a bit frustrating. I really find Objective-C to be too verbose a syntax for my taste. I also prefer to code in emacs vs. the Xcode UI. [Read More]

We have recently been working on an iOS app that requires a backend service. In this case I was looking for something leaner, simpler, and faster than Rails since it was only an API for a mobile app, no web front-end. I wanted it to be very lean and scalable so we could make it through early user testing without spending a lot on servers. Ok, ideally without spending anything on servers; basically how much could I squeeze out of one Heroku worker. [Read More]

There is often a tension between product management and engineering when it comes to time spent adding new features vs. time spent in code refactoring. One could even explain this in terms of top line vs bottom line descriptions. Features mean sales, codebase is an asset, and poor code quality is a liability that affects cost and thus profit. Sloppy, risky, or fragile code is even called "technical debt" in many circles. [Read More]

Over the holiday I had some time to investigate parsing expression grammars. I had done work in Lex and Yacc many years back when I was responsible for some kernel functionality and related system management kernel commands for a proprietary commercial operating system. I don't remember fondly my time working with Yacc. But then I read about PEGs and the Treetop Ruby library. It allows the use of simple grammer rules based in regular expressions and creates a parser ruby class from the grammer that can then be used in a ruby program. [Read More]

I have been investigating using the ruby state_machine gem for a project. State machines can be very handy in simplifying code where objects move through various states. The state_machine gem embeds state machine behavior into any class that uses it. My first test was to create a simple todo list example. The todo list will include a main list that contains items and sub-lists. This allows a way to organize items easily into sub-lists. [Read More]