As a developer, it’s easy to get buried in code and forget how people actually use what I’m writing. An interface element or workflow that seems intuitive to me can often lead to confusion and frustration in the casual visitor. If I want to transform my code into an application,…
Catch-all Routes in Rails
On one of our projects we were porting over a legacy application written in PHP to Rails. A lot of the application’s users accessed the site with bookmarked pages. So we wanted to redirect users when we saw specific words like “buy” or “.php”, so customers were not left staring…
Rails vs PHP
Though you hear it all the time, comparing Ruby on Rails to PHP really is not fair – they are different animals entirely, only sharing the goal of creating websites that do stuff. Rails, being a framework, could be more aptly compared to PHP frameworks, such as CakePHP, or Zend…
Use CSS to Mark Fields as Required
Curious on how the pros handle marking required fields on their forms? Wonder no more! Below I’ll describe a technique I employ on my own forms to make marking required fields a simple and straight-forward process. I will assume you have at least a basic working understanding of CSS, but…
Leadership: Actions vs. Words
Somehow, I ended up on this mailing list about leadership. The articles–put together by a local company–focused on teaching leadership and team building, and I always looked forward to reading them. Last September, I took a few minutes to write the author and company owner. I told him that I…
Testing, shmesting, who needs it?
Now that I’ve been here for a couple months, I guess it is time to post a blog, but about what? Since, in large part, testing is new to me, (and an important part of developing Thundertix) I thought I’d start there. So read on if you want to hear…
Feeling Lucky
Nicholas writes clean, elegant code. Paul contributes beautifully to interface interaction. Scott is a master of programming languages, and Manish and Manasi possess an enviable stick-to-itiveness attitude. Then there’s me. Fumbling as I am in learning Rails and attempting to pick up Scott’s reigns, I realize that I have been…
Ubercart: “Javascript Enabled”
For two days and many hours, I slaved over a Ubercart issue that insisted I must have “javascript enabled” in order to display missing credit card fields. Posts on the Ubercart forum suggested I look for javascript errors that might conflict with the onclick display of the credit card pane. …
Regarding Usability
In software, usability refers to the design of the interface that reflects an intuitive relationship between what a user wants to do, and how to do it. We are in the midst of the exciting redesign of one of our core services, ThunderTix, our online box office management system. In…
Agile, RoR, and the New Guy
Over the last six months, I began looking into Agile programming practices leading me to the Agile Austin users group. In April, Stacy and I attended our first meeting where we were fortunate to meet Nicholas Cancelliere–an active Agile Austin member, Certified Scrum Master, and agile instructor.  Nicholas joined our team on…