{ StevenHaddox.com }

So I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails the past few months but I’ve mostly been working on projects that already have the major underpinnings created. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a side project on and off and I’ve finally gotten one of my major hurdles accomplished and am pretty happy with how I did it. I’m open to code refinement, but I thought I’d share it since I couldn’t find much in the way of tutorials regarding flash.now with Rails via Google.

Essentially what I did was implement a way to update the regular flash and the flash.now values at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Share It:

I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »

Share It:

So I spent an extra hour over the last few mornings (Thursday and Friday) as well as a half hour Friday night working on a small tweak to my current blog.  I added a “splat” image whenever you move your mouse over an icon at the top of the page.  I did this primarily as I kept losing my mouse when I’d use the icons and I wanted to more clearly distinguish where you were on the menu.

I also did it as I need to use similar code on a few other projects I’m working on, but this site was the most suitable for it to be implemented in first and it was one of those things I could leave and pick up fairly easily without a huge loss if I didn’t finish it all in one sitting.

As to the process I went through it was fairly simple once I figured out how to best do it. Read the rest of this entry »

Share It:

As I woke up yesterday morning I was greeted to a loving wife who looked at me and said, “I’ll get her, you sleep in.  It’s Father’s Day.”  I had completely forgotten the occasion and was too tired (as I always am) to argue.  I gratefully rolled over and slept for another few hours while Katie took care of Paisley and let me sleep.

Katie made me a beautiful Father’s Day card from Paisley that was adorable.  I never could decide what I wanted for Father’s Day (seeing how the iPhone 3G doesn’t come out until July 11th).  Read the rest of this entry »

Share It:

Thought I’d take a moment to post a really quick comparison between my last job (although quite a bit of this applies to a couple of my previous jobs), and the company I’m currently contracting with Integrum Technologies.

Please note that although this list is a large portion of the differences, it is by no means all-inclusive as I can think of a ton of other differences that haven’t even been touched within this list. This is merely the most essential things to mention.
Read the rest of this entry »

Share It: