ActAsTaggableOn - Advanced Rails Tagging Plugin

Posted by chris
on Tuesday, December 04

One of my Intridea co-workers, Michael Bleigh, has put together an excellent tagging plugin, called ActsAsTaggableOn, which is meant to be a replacement for acts_as_taggable_on_steriods. ActsAsTaggableOn allows for multiple tag sets per model - for example, a user could have tag sets for sports, interests, music, etc. You can then reference the tag lists as user.sport_list, user.interest_list, and user.music_list, in addition to getting them all at once with user.tag_list

Here's his blog post with more details

RubyConf 2007

Posted by chris
on Friday, November 16

The 2007 RubyConf was a couple of weeks ago (Nov 2nd-4th) in Charlotte, NC . I attended with a few of my Intridea colleagues – Pradeep, Michael, and Jeremy. So this post is not all that timely, and I imagine anything worthwhile to say about RubyConf 2007 has already been blogged about to death. Not only that, but I was part of a panel at last week’s DCRUG meeting, where we discussed RubyConf, so I have already probably talked the topic to death. And yet, still I write… must be the egotist in me that assumes my 2 subscribers want, nay – need, to know there weren’t enough men’s restrooms, or there should have been more coffee on the last day. Here on the Better Endeavor Blog, we get into the meat of things and tell you what’s really important.

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Startup Weekend DC - Day 2

Posted by chris
on Sunday, October 28

Day 2 of Startup Weekend started out with a surprise. The night before a consensus had been built by a small group, and two members were going to combine those ideas into a 5-7 page powerpoint. Apparently they had their own ideas, because what was agreed upon by the small group, and what was presented were far apart.

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Rails Rumble

Posted by chris
on Monday, October 15

Last month I competed in the first annual Rails Rumble, a Ruby on Rails coding competition. The idea behind the competition was to design, develop, and deploy a fully-functional Rails application over the course of a weekend - 48 hours. Teams could consist of up to 4 people, but I chose to go solo. Why? Probably because I'm a little bit nuts...

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New Beginnings

Posted by chris
on Thursday, October 11

Hi, I'm Chris, your friendly neighborhood Ruby on Rails programmer. For the last 10 years I've moonlighted as a freelance web developer, spending my evening and weekends coding and designing, while also holding down full-time jobs. Most recently I've been employed by George Washington University, where I've worked full-time as a web developer for the past 2.5 years. Today was my last day at GW, and is also my last day as moonlighting freelance developer.

Why the big changes? I've accepted a position at Intridea, a DC-based Ruby on Rails development shop. Though I enjoyed my time at GW, and my many late nights of coding for my freelance business, I'm really looking forward to focusing all my efforts toward building Intridea. I've already been chatting with some of the guys there, and I know I'm going to learn a lot, because they're all really sharp. I'm also going to be able to play with cutting-edge Rails stuff that I've wanted to take for a whirl - stuff like unobtrusive javascript, Amazon Web Services, sass, and Rspec (among others).

Making the leap is helping to kickstart a few other projects that I've been putting off for a while. This blog, for one. I've been meaning to put this blog together for almost a year now, constantly having ideas that made me say "hey, I should blog about that." Now I have a place to do that. I'll be cross-posting some of the more technical articles on the Intridea blog, but some of the content here will be unique. I hope this blog will eventually be a good place for Rails tips, tricks, and wisdom, though you'll have to be the judge of that!