CyberFOX Software Inc.

Greetings,
What alternative do you suggest for using models in migrations? I was in several situations where I had to not only change the underlying db structure but change the contained data, too.
Data changes, especially moving data around, are almost always rake task-worthy in my experience.
The other side of that, populating large amounts of seed data [...]

Greetings,
[Edit: Since writing this article up back in early March, I've moved on from this job. The folks who are now maintaining it at least know where the pain points are, can run migrations safely, deploy it locally, and to dev servers, and to the main deployment area.  It's a working app, although I never [...]

Greetings,
There’s an interesting few blog posts going on about folks who work really hard. It started from Jason Calacanis’s article of tips on how to save money when running a startup (many of which are good, but #11 is ‘Fire people who are not workaholics…’) and that was picked up at the 37signals SvN [...]

Greetings,
I want to start by making it clear that I know why testing is good, and that it’s really important, but I think that the TDD proponents are glossing over the most difficult part of a project.
I would very much like someone to address the issue of modifying code that is not new, and not [...]

Greetings,
I’ve put up the latest version, 1.0.1 of JBidwatcher.  It’s mainly a bug fix release.  It includes a few new features towards better documentation, error messages, and recognition of eBay states, and a new (still completely optional) approach to the eBay affiliate idea.
One of the important fixes has to do with a wording change; eBay [...]

Greetings,
Programming should be fun, it’s what gets us programmers into it in the first place, and it’s what keeps us going at it.
Too many layers have been heaped on programming these days; most IDEs are oppressive, process-oriented beasts.
I, and many other programmers, have been concerned about how the next generation of programmers are going to [...]

Greetings,
A concerned user recently asked me how I was doing in the aftermath of the issue with eBay sales of JBidwatcher, specifically:
You seemed pretty depressed about it in your post to the website.
I was.
There was a really bad week there, while I was dealing with all of it, back and forth, and just feeling like [...]

Greetings,
I had a friend recently who asked about what programming languages they should learn. He primarily works as a system and network administrator, and had been bombarded by ‘Learn Ruby!’ from a bunch of evangelists recently. I assured him it wasn’t necessary, and came up with this interesting list.
What language you work in [...]

Greetings,
Wooof… Well, MindCamp2.0 is a minute away from opening up, theoretically, and I’m about 30 minutes away from being there.
I’m really hoping this lets me immerse myself in a crowd of very smart people thinking about cool stuff, so that I can kick-start my own brain cells into working a bit better on my [...]

Greetings,
Robert Scoble takes Mark Lucovsky to task over seeing passion in Google workers sticking around until all hours of the night.
This is a hard thing to explain if you haven’t been there. I’ve been there twice, once with McAfee Associates, in full-bore, turbo-charged engineer mode, fighting against the world-wide virus writing epidemic in the [...]