A review of Leancamp


A couple of days ago I attended an Unconfernce called Leancamp. My main reason for going was that David Heinemeier Hansson - the creator of RubyOnRails and co-author of Getting Real and Rework was speaking.

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A review of Rework.


Rework is largely a rehash of Getting Real, but with the focus moved away from people who write software, onto people involved in all aspects of running a business. The refocussing allows Fried and DHH to reach a far wider audience with their opinions. Their wisdom, gained by experience, of how to deliver software will be read by people who would have never considered reading Getting Real. That’s pretty savvy market positioning and something that wouldn’t have been achieved by a series of blog posts on their website.

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A quick post on a new theme


Nesta CMS has recently introduced theme support, and I had recently spotted the penguin classics theme on tumblr. I thought I’d convert it.

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Thoughts on MongoHQ pricing


I was lucky enough to be a beta-tester for MongoHQ, the hosted MongoDB service. Yesterday (20100226) they came out of private beta, and launched their pricing options to the world. The results, as MongoMapper author John Nunemaker tweeted, were surprising…

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Using Chowder for Simple Rack-based authentication


I have been searching for some time for a simple rack based authentication system. A key requirement for me is that I’d like it to work with the data storage mechanism of my choice - MongoMapper. I spotted a project on github called Chowder, which worked really nicely…

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Getting useful information out of git log


A useful bit of command line foo, for getting useful information out of git log.

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Using curl -I to detect the MIME type of a URL


Using curl with the -I flag retrieves just the header information - handy for detecting the MIME type of a URL.

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Customising the JVM memory allocation using MAVEN_OPTS


Avoiding Java heap space errors in the JVM with Maven and MAVEN_OPTS.

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