Tech Talk: Seth Ladd on Dart
Seth Ladd (Google, @sethladd) joined us last week and presented An Introduction to Dart: The structured web development platform. You should check it out, the folks over at Google are doing some...
View ArticleProject/Technology Showcase, April 25th
Carbon Five and Good Eggs are joining up to show off some of the projects they’ve recently worked with an emphasis on the technology that made them possible. We want to share what we think is...
View ArticleAsynchronous JavaScript Testing in Jasmine, Mocha, and Vows
The rise in popularity of JavaScript, especially on the server-side, has introduced more and more developers to asynchronous programming. Asynchronous, event-driven programming also requires a change...
View ArticleExtracting Data Access Out of Active Record
The Active Record pattern combines data access and domain logic. Over time, an Active Record class can accumulate a large amount of query methods. Moving these methods into a separate object can...
View ArticleVirtual phones to ease the development of telephony applications
Unless you have access to three phones at all time, develop telephony-enabled web app is painful. Consider this scenario: Alice calls Bruce. Bruce answers. Bruce then is transferred to Carl. To...
View ArticleKeeping Domain Models Cohesive with Collaborators
As an application matures, classes begin to take on more and more responsibilities. Eventually a class’s main responsibility starts to become obscured. You can prevent overwhelming your classes by...
View ArticleRaygun: Hit the Ground Running When You Start Your Next Project
.clearfix { display: inline-block; } .tech div { width: 220px; float: left; } .tech h3 { margin-left: 10px; } We start new Rails projects all the time, for client, side and internal projects. Each...
View ArticleIntegrating 3rd-Party APIs: Listen to Your Tests
When integrating 3rd-party APIs, it’s important to listen to your tests. The most common design relies on tests that directly mock the 3rd-party API. These tests are brittle, but are often acceptable...
View ArticleSweeter Javascript: Defining Properties to Add Syntactic Sugar
Syntatic sugar makes for more human-readable code and, if done correctly, provides for more flexibility. In the world of Node many turn to Coffeescript to add that “sweetness”, but you can also achieve...
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Join Lane and Courtney in the Big Apple for LeanUX NYC
Join Lane Halley and Courtney Hemphill in NYC April 11th-13th, 2013 Spend some time this spring in Manhattan learning from 25 designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and at least a couple developers at...
View ArticleParallel HTTP Requests with Faraday and Typhoeus
On a recent project, I needed to post parallel JSON requests to an API endpoint, and asynchronously handle the responses. I like Rack‘s middleware-based approach to handling HTTP requests on the server...
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Tight-Knit Javascript Animations: Exploring the GreenSock Animation Platform...
THE ABSTRACT (tl;dr) The GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is an excellent choice for javascript-based animations. Check out a demo: Josef Müller-Brockmann Knittin’ GreenSocks But you should really...
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Using HAProxy with Socket.io and SSL
Donning my ops hat a bit over the last few months, I have learned a bit about HAProxy, Node.js, and Socket.io. I was pretty surprised by how little definitive information there was on what I was trying...
View ArticleA Strategy for Loading Page Specific JavaScript
Since the introduction of the asset pipeline, managing javascript assets in a typical rails application is pretty straight forward. You figure out some structure for organizing the files under...
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Asian Art Museum Named Finalist for International Design Communication Awards
Congratulations to our good friends at the Asian Art Museum, who have been named as finalists in two categories at this year’s International Design Communication Awards: “Best Exhibition Communication”...
View ArticleSinatra Best Practices: Part One
While Sinatra’s one-file approach may work well for your one-off, smaller application – it can quickly become a mess as you add on multiple routes, route-handlers, helpers, and configuration. So what’s...
View ArticleSinatra Best Practices: Part Two
In Sinatra Best Practices: Part One we saw how to break up your Sinatra application into smaller bite-size pieces. Today, we’re going to explore testing, which will also compel us to address...
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Writing Deterministic & Performant Specs with Capybara
Acceptance tests are a great tool for guiding [outside in testing] and defining application behavior. Unfortunately they are also notoriously slow and often brittle. At Carbon Five we usually use...
View ArticleBDD Composition over Inheritance with RSpec Shared Examples
The technique of composition over inheritience is more than simply encapsulating objects into larger entities; its really about defining models as being made up of resuable behaviors. It makes sense...
View ArticleMinimizing downtime when deploying to Heroku
Heroku has become our default hosting platform for most new projects. It’s simple to deploy new rails apps, encourages some good conventions, is able to provide the services most applications need, and...
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