Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

My last few months have been dedicated to the development of Boost's new online survey tool, SonarHQ. This past week, we released SonarHQ into Beta, and its live for you to use! It's exciting to see it out in the wild... we hope you enjoy it! We'd love to hear your feedback so check it out and let us know what you think. Here's a bit more information about SonarHQ:

What SonarHQ Does

The Tech Specs

SonarHQ is a Ruby on Rails application. It's currently running Rails v2.2 on a SliceHost Ubuntu server. We're using Workling/Starling for background processes and we've rolled our own flash graphs for charting poll results. The app is (mostly) RESTful and we're leveraging that fact in order to create reports for ourselves via ActiveResource. We're using Chartbeat and New Relic to monitor the application and we've got a Tender app set up for support.

So that's about it. Go take a little looksie and then sign up! Play around and be sure to let us know what you think. :)

I'm using the Workling Plugin with Starling on my project at Boost to run processes in the background. Recently, we deployed 2 projects on the same server, and rather than run 2 separate instances of Starling, we just let both apps talk to the same Starling instance. All was well with the world until I noticed that one of my apps was mysteriously creating records in the other app's database. Burn! It appeared that Starling didn't know which app the processes belonged to, so it was always running them on 1 app and never the other one. Eeek!

Thankfully, this was easily remedied by revisiting the options for my workling.yml file in the Workling README:

Workling copies a file called workling.yml into your applications config directory. 
The config file tells Workling on which port Starling is listening. 

Notice that the default production port is 15151. This means you'll need to start 
Starling with -p 15151 on production. 

You can also use this config file to pass configuration options to the memcache 
client which workling uses to connect to starling. use the key 'memcache_options' for this. 

You can also set sleep time for each Worker. See the key 'listeners' for this. 
Put in the modularized Class name as a key. 

    development:
      listens_on: localhost:22122
      sleep_time: 2
      reset_time: 30
      listeners:
        Util:
          sleep_time: 20
      memcache_options:
        namespace: myapp_development
        
    production:
      listens_on: localhost:22122, localhost:221223, localhost:221224
      sleep_time: 2
      reset_time: 30

See that key under memcache_options? Namespace to the rescue! If you set this in your workling.yml file, your Starling instance will never be confused again. Just a quick tip so you don't get burned like I did. Good luck!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day - "an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology." I only just found out about it, so unfortunately I don't have an article prepared, but I wanted to help by raising a little awareness and inviting you to go read some of the articles that have been published today in honor of women in technology. Here are a few to get started:

• Ada Lovelace Day - Finding Ada by Desi McAdam
• Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora by Mackenzie Morgan
• Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day by Audrey Eschright
• Ada Lovelace Day - Grace Hopper by Brenda Wallace
• Ada Lovelace Day by Liz Henry
• Ada Lovelace Day: Tribute to Suw Charman-Anderson by Kevin Anderson (Husband of Suw Charman-Anderson, creator of Ada Lovelace Day)

There are several more links to articles on the pledge website. Even if you don't sign the pledge or write a post, today I encourage you to think about all the tech women you know & celebrate them. :)

So Day 2 at Webstock was just as fab as Day 1. As promised, I put together a few of my favorites from Day 2.

Derek's talk was about accessibility. It was a great session, and it made me realize that accessibility is not something I really think about, but it definitely should be. One thing he said that I really liked was this: "Just because something is compliant doesn't mean it's easy to use." I think this statement applies to so much more than accessibility. We need to focus on user experience as well as standards compliance. In addition to that, Derek totally wowed me with some of the things he's working on using Ubiquity to improve accessibility.

After hearing this talk, Joshua Porter's book, Designing for the Social Web, went directly onto my wish list. He had so many valuable tips about signup processes, most notably the fact that the form is not the problem with signup - the problem is changing peoples minds about your software. While the form can certainly be an obstacle, the process is much more important. Specifically, I liked the way Josh described the three types of people you should design for: the people who already know they want to sign up, the people who want more information to make sure your product is for them, and the skeptics. It was quite interesting to think about a signup process in this 3-tiered manner.

I'll let you read the transcript and draw your own conclusions about this one. :)

I thought this was a great way to end Webstock. Damian Conway sent us forth with a mission to implement the "Theory of Hippocratic Web Design". He said that we can collectively change our ideals and become people who really care about those we serve. The practices for Damian's theory seem so simple, but often they get overlooked. These things should be part of how we work everyday.

• Learn and share good practices
• Do your best work
• Know your own limitations - don't pretend you're an expert in technologies that you're not.
• Work in your client's best interest - don't screw them over!
• Be professional

So by now I think I have sufficiently convinced you that Webstock contained heaps (as the kiwis say) of awesomeness. I'm so glad I went and I hope to get the chance to attend future Webstocks. Thanks to all the speakers and all the fun people that took the time to chat with me!