Joe Fiorini: Archive

Jul 27th

Jul 26th

An Introduction to Ruby on Rails

View more presentations from Joe Fiorini. Talk I gave at the Cleveland Web SIG on June 19, 2010.

Jul 14th

Watch

There’s been a rumor going around on Twitter: In ‘BTTF’ Doc Brown sets the time clock in the Delorean to a day 25 years in the future, today is that day. As this clip proves, not only did he never enter such a date, but “25 years into the future” (as he states as the time he wants to visit) would have been Oct. 25, 2010. Mattel: you may have another 5 years to...

Jul 5th

“The […] “TETRIS” game is a simple game […], and soon becomes...”

– Nintendo’s Dr. Mario Patent

Jun 24th

Intro to Ruby on Rails Links

Cleveland Ruby Brigade http://www.meetup.com/ClevelandRuby Installing Ruby RVM – Ruby Version Manager (Mac OSX/*Nix only) Windows fork of RVM Windows Alternate - look for 1.9.1 RubyInstaller Media Free Rails screencasts Ruby news in 5 minutes Official Rails screencasts Documentation Rails Guides (see “Edge” guides) API Documentation Official Blog Ruby...

Jun 19th

Jun 12th

137 notes

HTML5 Video on the iPhone

I said I’d update when I made my HTML5 video demo play on my iPhone. Well, today is a sweet day. Thanks to the good people at PandaStream, I was able to get it working. The key is twofold: The video must not only be encoded H.264, but it needs a QuickTime supported container type. This works fine with FlowPlayer (the Flash player we’re using). The video’s extension must be...

Apr 18th

Designing Code →

Steve Smith gave a great talk at Great Lakes Ruby Bash on designing code. Not MVC vs. MVP vs. insert your architecture here, but applying visual design techniques to your code. This was very poignant for me with my recent interest in learning visual design. I try to make my code as easy to look at as possible. Steve gave some extremely useful advice such as: clean up other team member’s...

Apr 17th

HTML5 Video iPhone/iPad Roundup

Looking to do HTML5 Video on the iPhone/iPad? Here are some resources that I’ve found today that may help. I’ll admit, I still don’t have a video playing on the iPhone, but I’m working on it; and I’ll update here when I get working. In the meantime, enjoy! Safari HTML5 Audio and Video Guide (Official Documentation) Notes on HTML5 Video and iPhone (Jonathan Stark) ...

Apr 15th

Programmer optimism, and the "Death March" →

Mark knows what he’s talking about here. This is a great description of the “garbage in, garbage out” that leads to the failure of many IT projects (of course by failure I mean over estimate, over budget). Agile solves this problem by expecting that the outputs of the estimation process will continue to be refined throughout the course of the project.

Mar 18th

Toyota's Journey from Waterfall to Lean Software... →

Toyota is known for their manufacturing process. People have studied and emulated it for years. Recently Mary and Tom Poppendieck brought it to software development. I assumed Toyota used their reknowned manufacturing process to write the software for their vehicles. Henrik’s article proved me wrong. My favorite quote from the article: My conclusion after the trip was “well, now I know...

Mar 17th

492 notes

Yes. Another Backup Lecture. →

If you aren’t backing up regularly, read this. If you are backing up regularly, good for you. Now go read this.

Mar 16th

Teamicide (not to be confused with Teamocil) →

One team’s experiences after dropping agile in favor of a more traditional process. Excellent proof that an agile process is more than the cowboy programming many believe it to be.

Mar 16th

1 note

Lean Dog Agile Explained →

Jon Stahl’s slide deck shows how his company delivers quality products quickly and efficiently. He is a master at embracing the limitations inherent in software development (difficult estimations, vague requirements, uneducated customers). Lean Dog proves that you can have speed and quality, you just need to plan for both.

Mar 12th

Mar 10th

67 notes

Rework: the Business Book from 37signals →

Their first book, Getting Real, was about building web-based software. Their new book continues the less-is-more theme and teaches how to build and run a business. Bucking conventional “wisdom”, Rework has great potential for the freelancer/small business owner.

Mar 9th

iPad Application Design →

For those interested in User Experience (and shouldn’t we all be?), this article goes into some great metaphors and patterns for designing for the iPad. A must read for anyone interested in desktop or iPad development!

Mar 9th

Bring Back the Metal Bashers →

Is it time to increase focus on software quality yet? If not now, when?

Mar 8th

2 notes

HTML5 for the Rest of Us →

The HTML5 spec is tough to read. It’s 900 pages of goodness… if you write browsers for a living. However, the vast majority of developers who actually use HTML don’t write browsers. This is the spec reference for the rest of us. (Heard through Jeremy Keith on the Boagworld Podcast)

Mar 6th

1 note

Nesta - a CMS for Ruby Developers →

Nesta appears to be a great CMS for Ruby developers looking for a quick & simple way to publish content. You can create pages as files in Textile or Markdown; if you need something more dynamic, you can mix in Haml templates. Nesta is currently used to power the PeepCode Blog and will soon be powering the Cleveland Ruby Brigade website.

Mar 6th

My Top CodeMash Sessions

For those attending #codemash next week, here are some interesting sessions you might want to check out. And by “interesting”, I mean a) speakers I have seen in the past and know are top quality or b) topics I know a bit about and find interesting. Thursday 9:45 Source Control for People Who Don’t Like Source Control with Jim Weirich 11:00 Starting Up Fast - Lessons from the...

Jan 13th

The Ruby Draft Specification

Having a formal specification of what makes a language “Ruby” is a good idea. It gives us a lexicon which makes things easier to discuss (for e.g. metaclass vs. eigenclass, plus the operators <=> and « have a dozen different names). It also goes a long way towards proving that Ruby is a mature language that anyone can adopt; and I think it would make people more...

Dec 2nd

Rumble Panel at CodeMash

Back in May, Rails Rumble founder Nick Plante moderated a panel at Railsconf to answer questions about developing web applications in 48 hours for the Rails Rumble competition. I am very excited to announce that this panel has been accepted to CodeMash 2010. This time the panel will be moderated by former panelist Joe Fiorini and 2008 grand prize winner Josh Walsh. Panelists include Josh Owens...

Nov 17th

2 tags

Watch

A well known experiment started in the late 1960s showed a strong correllation between will power as a child and success later in life. The question is still open as to what this correllation really means. In this talk I will explain the details of the study and explore a possible answer. Is success predetermined by personality traits or can we learn the skills that will lead us to success? What...

Nov 6th

Nov 1st

1 tag

Push vs. Pull in a Connected Society →

Twitter vs. RSS, the ultimate showdown.

Oct 30th

1 tag

Practice Makes Perfect →

My post about practicing for programmers. It’s not just for musicians and athletes anymore!

Oct 30th

Oct 29th

Oct 28th

Watch

gary: The Thank You Economy. The world of content is shifting so fast and word of mouth marketing is moving even faster, these two collide to create the “Thank You Economy” Having trouble viewing this video? Try the Quicktime version.

Oct 28th

32 notes

Oct 27th

Open Source Election Software - The Code →

The code for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s Trust the Vote software is being hosted on GitHub, the open source hosting of choice for this programmer and many others. Go check out the code, after all, that’s the point, isn’t it?

Oct 26th

Open Source Election Software Released →

This is the first release of the components making up the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation’s election software package. The registration & front-end voting is based on Ruby on Rails, while the backend tabulation system is Python. The entire thing is meant to run on a Linux-based system. It’s a great day for open source!

Oct 26th

joshwalsh: Our RailsRumble team interview with...