Rob at the booth!

A technical notebook post from the FIND website, in which Rob discusses its complex content model.

The first in a series of technical notebook posts about implementing the FIND website. In this one, Rob discusses the challenges of implementing a site in which Arabic and English versions of the content must functionally and beautifully coexist.

Alison & Rob are both speaking this week at the ModevEast conference, taking place in McLean, VA. See you there!

Rob's Medium post about what he learned from building Llama or Alpaca? for the 2013 Rails Rumble hackathon.

Thinking about adding a feedback form to your iOS and Android apps? We recently sat down with Alison Heittman to talk about why you'd want to, and how Appygram makes it easy to both get the form working and route the messages to the people who want to read them.

Join Rob & Alison at the first RVA Titanium User Group Meetup, where we will be giving a quick intro to the platform for those who want to know more about it and of course talk about our experiences on developing our application with Titanium.

The October 2012 issue of National Geographic focuses on elephant ivory poaching. Our Elephant Database and ETIS projects contributed statistics.

Slightly modify newrelic.yml to enable Rails 3.1 asset precompilation on Heroku's Cedar stack with New Relic RPM enabled.

Vanity Fair's August 2011 article, Agony and Ivory, covers the elephant poaching crisis and includes interviews with partners from our Elephant Database and ETIS projects.

Using a live network pull from PostLaunch CMS, I'm avoiding complex CMS integration and /public bloat on a Rails deployment to Heroku. I'm even saving a lot of template code duplication. And I'm psyched about it!

Web-scale systems should be economical to operate at any load level, and have in-built resilience against localized problems. Infrastructure as a service cloud offerings, like Amazon AWS, have made it easy and economical to provision servers and storage. But outages like the recent AWS us-east-1 failure quickly expose the systems that weren't designed in a way to survive a localized infrastructure breakdown.

Lots of scripting languages run on the Java VM. JRuby has grown into something uniquely important, by embracing the strengths of both Ruby and Java culture. In lightning talk mode, we’ll survey some hybrid projects like celerity and RedCar that are only possible in JRuby, and look at the reasons why. We’ll look at warbler and some multicore metrics, to see how JRuby can help a Rubyist satisfy enterprise demands. For a brief dig into the internals, we’ll see an embedded JRuby interpreter used for web page templating inside an OSGi cloud platform. Finally we’ll take some BDD practices for a spin with Cucumber, to see how a little Ruby influence can impact any development project in any language.

The hidden agenda behind GoGoEgo as a Web Development framework: creating a friendly framework that provides one solid development model, but warmly embraces others.