Jon Kinney Blog

BDD: My quest to become a professional tester

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:55:43 GMT

Now I’m not saying that I only want to be a tester of web applications. After all, creating them is what I enjoy the most. However, I believe that to be a professional coder, you need to test your applications. Now I’m not talking about that day or two at the end of a project when you run through the application in your browser and hope that nothing breaks. No, I’m talking about real testing. Testing that is done alongside the code, if not before. To me, testing is a tool that I’m integrating into my coding stack that is simply going to become part of how I write an application.

Web Design for Developers: A Programmer's Guide to Design Tools and Techniques

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:11:33 GMT

I recently had the privilege of tech reviewing a great book about how to create standards compliant, accessible, and attractive web designs. The goal of the book is to cover web design with the programmer in mind. Brian Hogan, the book's author, does this by taking the reader on a journey to build the next great social recipe sharing website "Foodbox". To me this book helps arm application developers with the knowledge to help blur the line that some companies try to arbitrarily place between a design team and a development team. After all, just because someone is a "coder" doesn't mean he or she can't create an attractive and usable site!

My first full studio album finished!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:03:20 GMT

Well... when I say *my* I mean the first album that I've produced and mixed. My original album is my next studio project and should be a lot of fun. The album I just finished, however, was for The Innocent Men a 7-man all male a cappella vocal band from UWEC. They rocked pretty hard on this album and I was happy to be a part of it.

Deploying to multiple server environments with cap

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:07:34 GMT

Most anytime I develop a web application I need to deploy to multiple server environments. For me this used to mean maintaining two separate deploy.rb scripts, and I would rename one while deploying to staging, and then rename the other when I needed to deploy to production. After about three deploys I said, the hell with this! And I figured out how to allow the specification of your deployment at the command line during the cap deploy task.

Keeping passenger apps live with cron

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:07:48 GMT

Like many of the “cool kids” in the rails world, I have started using passenger for hosting most of my rails apps on my personal server. One of the great features is that passenger has the ability to “spin up” more instances to a site that is getting a lot of page requests, while not paying as much attention to a site that isn’t receiving any traffic at the moment. This load balancing works great for me for the most part, but one disadvantage is that if a site is left too long without a request it can be very slow to get the site “spun up” again. That is where our new friend cron can help.

Logging cron jobs on ubuntu

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:26:18 GMT

I am running a VPS over at SilverRack.com and I love it. Dave (the owner) has been very helpful and responsive anytime I’ve had questions or issues, and I highly recommend their service. Also if you’re a member of a local ruby user’s group then you can get $10 off the standard 256mb slice making it extremely affordable to have your very own server! I also have an unlimited Dreamhost account, but I like having root access and full reign of my server.

Welcome to my new home on the web

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:32:32 GMT

It’s been a long time coming but I finally got my new site up and running on the open source Rails CMS engine Radiant. I installed a ton of plugins to get the site tweaked out just how I wanted it, and it’s now a full fledged blog with comment and archiving support, tagging, etc.

Madison web meetup: Advanced CSS

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:48:00 GMT

Recently Inacom had the privilege of hosting the Madison Web Design & Development Meetup. The topic for this meeting was Advanced CSS. I put together a sideshow to try to keep the presentation more guided, but because of the depth of the topic we wound up going quite a bit over our loose 1 hour time slot. I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking around and seeming quite interested! I had a great time presenting and I hope that you all enjoyed our discussions. If you're looking for the demo files and the presentation check them out in the full article.

Merb merged into Rails 3!

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:28:00 GMT

Some very shocking and awesome news has recently hit the ruby community. Merb is being merged into Rails and will culminate with a release of rails sometime around February next year. Sporting the name Rails3, this marks only the 2nd time any 2 major web frameworks have put down the gloves and hugged it out. I'm excited to get some of the performance optimizations promised by the merb core, and am looking forward to a unified community.

JQuery adopted by Microsoft for VS 08

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Javascript libraries like prototype, it's friend scriptaculous, and the newcomer jQuery have been making web developer's lives easier for a few years now. With a javascript library you can turn a verbose DOM selection like:

   1  document.getElementById('products')

into something a little shorter and sweeter:

   1  $('products')

They allow for so much more including animations, but that is the subject of another blog post entirely.