Trying to Teach Web Development
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Lately I've been trying to teach an awesome friend front-end web development. It's so hard to even know where to begin.
I started writing HTML when I was 10 years old. Back then, it was easy. We were writing our tags in all caps (HOW AWFUL), not closing tags if we didn't feel like it, frames were regarded as professional, and the animated gif was cool (some would say it still is).
I remember when Javascript became popular and JavascriptKit.com was the place to get copy and paste scripts for your site. I can remember when CSS started to become popular and when table layouts finally died out. It was easy to pick stuff. The technologies evolved at the rate that I learned them (which was awesome).
Moved To Heroku
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I posted a screencast on Heroku a few months ago. Since then, my company has moved all of their stuff to Heroku. It has been working really great for us.
I've had my blog on GitHub pages for awhile. I recently came across a good article on running Jekyll from the Ruby5 podcast. It was really easy to get setup. So far, I'm a fan of my new setup.
I'm still working on my Rails 3 version of my blog when I have time. Lately, I've been playing a lot of music and occasionally dabbling with Markdownr.com due to a recent spike in traffic (thanks to @defunkt).
App Store Rejection
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December was a month of rejection for me. The X3watch app another of my client's apps, and LifeChurch.tv's Bible app (which I wrote most of but am no longer a part of) got rejected.
Apple changed the rules recently, which is fine. They change the App Store every month or so. Normally, you just click accept to the new terms and go about your business. Do you ever read EULAs? I don't. Basically the same thing.
The important change to note (that they obviously didn't highlight, but expected you to read the massive terms in legal speak) was their new policy on undocumented APIs. Before, private APIs were not allowed and undocumented APIs were just frowned upon but still allowed.
Running Rails Local Development with Nginx, Postgres, and Passenger with Homebrew
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Update 03/03/12: Nowadays, I recommend using Foreman or Pow. This isn't a horrible approach, but definitely more complicated than I like to have things.
Lately I have been playing with Homebrew, an awesome package manager for Mac OS X. I really like not having to worry about dependencies and such when installing. The "rarely sudo" mentality is also pretty great.
When I noticed the Nginx (a sweet open source web server that is way better than Apache) had a --with-passenger option (which is also way awesome), I figured I'd give it a shot. I was using the built-in Apache with Passenger Preference Pane, which was pretty cool, but I really like Nginx, so I switched. I also really wanted to start using PostgreSQL instead of SQLite since all of my stuff is hosted on Heroku and that's what they're running. (I do plan on writing a Preference Pane for doing for this setup eventually.)
Screencast: Reuse Code Across iPhone Applications with a Static Library and Git
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A few of my friends have recently asked me how to share code between their applications. Here's a screencast walking you through how I solve this problem. It works really well for me. I hope this is useful to you.
You can get my terminal shortcuts from my dot files repo on GitHub. You can also find the test app and test library on GitHub.
The git submodule documentation might also be useful to you if you're new to working with submodules. If that's a little hard to understand (I know it is for me), just try googling it. There's a lot of good resources on submodules.