We recently added an API to The Winnower to support our new Wordpress Plugin. It was a great experience in both product and software design. Wordpress support is the first of a few great features we're adding to The Winnower to aid our users in publishing.
It was suprising to me, but these days a lot of academic publishing, if not in journals, is done on blogs. The Winnower provided publishing services to papers which were uploaded via Word or L…
Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach the Intro to HTML and CSS course with Girl Develop It, a non profit organization that welcomes all, but focuses on teaching women software and web development skills. They not only teach programming, but also teach programming related topics, such as contributing to open source software, and support other organizations that provide women with opportunities in education and development.
The Intro to HTM…
While working on my pet project for matching tennis partners I decided to make a match history page. It displays a player's recent matches and some information pertaining to them: who played when, who won, and how much that win affected their score on the site. I also wanted each match history log to be separated by color-coded boxes.
This was the end result:
The first solution I came up with used a bunch of if statements and some messy view lo…
My home has radiators that are 70ish years old. I'm going to guess the air vents are 10-30 years old. It's supposed to let the air out while the pipe fills with steam. Then and this is the important part, it stops letting anything out of the pipe and keeps the steam in the pipe. Some of our valves weren't letting the air out, and some was letting everything out.
Also;
I was expressing frustration with moving money around the other day and was asked to share what I knew. This is an incomplete list of ways to move money, and their consequences. Moving money (and in turn getting paid or paying others) is one of the most important yet strangely high-friction things a business has to do. On top of that, most of it is frustrating from a technical standpoint.
I'm not going to cover moving money on behalf of other peo…
Lately most of my writing has been over at Wizard Development's blog. Some of it (about building the business) might be interesting to you. Some of it (about building technology) might not.
-Francis
PS I also have been posting about robots over there since Wizard Development lets me work on robots.
Earlier this week we had this year's first NodeBots NYC event! Andrew and Myself were happy to host. We need to thank About.com for giving us food, space and heat.
As you may know, we share our library of electronics with ScriptEd, a non-profit which teaches programming in under-resourced schools around the city. So we were quite overjoyed when the NYC conference, Empire Node, donated their Arduino kits from their conference this past Fall. Thes…
In 2014 our plan was twofold; Help small business's dreams come true and to be a model for how we'd like our industry to operate. In 9 months we came close to achiving everything we wanted to. Close enough that I don't think we were ambitious enough.
In March 2014 after hanging out with the Flatiron BK-000 class for 4 months, I did an open call for applicants. I was starting a new dev shop and I wanted them. My theory was that I could teach them…
Rick was driving north on I-95, he had to find an uplink or this whole trip had been for nothing. "Rose, scan the vehicles ahead." His onboard computer sprang into action attempting to connect to internal networks of each and every car on the road around him. "No joy" she responded. All the cars either were too outdated to allow wireless access or detected their connection attempt and shut it down before they could get in. Rick sped past the cars…
I was recently helping Sara debug an issue with a project for an upcoming book she's writing a chapter in. She was using Johnny-Five and a Spark Core to remotely control a boat with JavaScript.
The setup was a sparkfun motor driver and a standard servo hooked to A0 and A1 of the Spark Core.
Sara had one submersible thruster on the boat hooked up to the motor driver and a rudder hooked up to the servo. She was using VoodooSpark with Jo…
I have a video of my talk at RobotsConf 2013!
I've also got a video of my informal session at JSCONF 2014!
And lastly (and most excitingly)
I have a video Sara talking as jQuery Chicago 2014!
There are lots of ways to host, deploy and maintain applications. We often use Heroku because the tradeoff of control gives you a lot of operational benefits that are expensive to build and maintain. In this post we're going to be talking about the hurdles around moving a legacy PHP application to Heroku.
Note: It's been years since I've been active with PHP and the rest of my team hasn't had the pleasure. There's a good chance I'm missing obvi…
I've been reviewing a lot of projects lately and I thought I should share what I look for when evaluating the code quality and maturity of a project. My team is often brought in to "clean up" an existing system. This might include bug fixes, new features, a rebranding, and scaling issues. This will be the first in, hopefully, a series of posts about our approach. I'd like to write down my findings in hope that if we all learn from these mistakes…
Any sufficiently mature development team eventually has someone who makes a build status indicator. This one is ours.
The WizardDev StatusBot shows us the current status of the latest build, the repo and branch names, and the commit message. We have it on our wall and can glance at it whenever we're curious.
Today I'll take you through my build processes and how I figured out the different components to build our status bot.
I had the absolute pleasure to join the people at Ghostalk the other day for their last episode of the season. They let me talk aboutrobots, Wizard Development, programming education, more robots and even how to contribute to their Ghost Blogging Platform.
-Francis
