I tend to be a little skeptical of the new and shiny. There is often a
lot of hype about how life changing some new website or gizmo is going
to be. Sometimes, however, something comes along that does live up to
the hype. The latest one I’ve found is a rather nondescript site called
ifttt. The URL is strange, until you understand
that it stands for “If This Then That”. What the site does is allow you
to automate bits of your digital life by watching for events (the “if
this” portion), and then taking an action (the “then that” portion). It
lets you tie together the various sites and services that you use,
allowing you to do even more with them.
This warrants an example, perhaps.
Let’s say you take lots of pictures of your kids with Instagram. And
let’s say your mom (or grandmother) isn’t the most tech-savvy user. She
uses email, but doesn’t have a smartphone and doesn’t want one. She
doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could
automatically email any pictures you post to Instagram to your mother so
that she doesn’t give you a guilt trip for never sending her pictures of
her grandkids (hypothetically speaking, of course. Any resemblance to my
own mother is purely coincidental). Ifttt can do that for you. What
about those receipts you get emailed to you every month that you need at
the end of the year for taxes? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get
those sent to a specific folder in Evernote so that they’re all in one
place? Ifttt can do that for you. You know all those links that come
across your Twitter stream that you don’t take the time to read?
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just favorite the tweet and have the
link in the tweet automagically added to your Instapaper account? Ifttt
can do that for you.
So, how does it work?
Ifttt is built on the idea of triggers, channels, tasks, and recipes.
Channels represent the hooks into the
websites you use. Gmail, Google Reader,Twitter, Facebook, Evernote,
Dropbox, Instagram, etc. If it’s a popular service, ifttt probably has a
channel for it. There are also general channels for things like RSS
feeds that aren’t tied to a specific service.
Triggers then are events that occur on these services. A picture is
taken on Instagram, a new email appears in your Gmail account, someone
new follows you on Twitter. Triggers allow you to specify when you want
to take action. They also frequently allow you to specify criteria. In
the case of Gmail, for example, you can specify that you only want to
take action if the email is from a specific person, or contains a
certain word in the subject line. If you’ve ever created filters in
Gmail or Outlook, it’s the same concept, but applied on a much larger
scale.
Tasks, like Triggers, are built on Channels. They allow you to perform
tasks in reaction to a trigger. Examples of tasks would be things like:
- Sending an email
- Creating a new note in Evernote
- Sending a tweet
- Send an SMS message
Tasks let you use data from the triggers (ie the subject line in an
email) in your task. So you could, for example, use the subject of an
email to populate the subject of your note in Evernote.
Recipes are pre-made combinations of the
other items, created either by the team at ifttt, by other users, or
yourself. There are a lot of them, and chances are you will find a lot
of them that you can put to use immediately. Here are a few that I’m
either using myself or found interesting:
You get the idea.
I’ve only been using this service for a couple of months, but I’ve
already discovered a lot of useful things I can automate with it.
Posting things to Twitter for me, taking receipts that I get in email
and adding them to my Tax Folder in Evernote, etc. This saves me time
and makes my life easier. What’s most exciting though is that there is
that this service is very young, and has a lot of potential. There are a
lot more channels, tasks, and triggers yet to be created. Perhaps one
day they will add the ability to do conditionals, or even more complex
logic, using JavaScript or some other language.
It’s early, but I see a lot of potential here. Go create an account and
try it out yourself. What can you automate?
Like Marco Arment I’m
not qualified to eulogize Steve Jobs, but I owe a lot to him so I need
to say something.
My first computer was an Apple //c. 1985. I spent a lot of time on that
computer. A lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.
I was a nerdy kid to begin with, and I instantly fell in love with it. I
spent endless hours on that computer. Playing games, writing programs in
BASIC, and generally just exploring the new world that it opened up for
me. Those hours spent in front of the computer paid off. I went on,
years later, to write code professionally. It’s not an exaggeration to
say that owning that Apple //c shaped who I became.
I’ve admired Steve Jobs since I was old enough to know who he was. When
he founded NEXT, I desperately wanted one of those beautiful (and
expensive) systems. I’ve seen every movie Pixar has put out. I’ve been
inspired by his business sense, his design savvy, and his drive. He’s
accomplished more in his abbreviated lifetime than most people could
accomplish in ten. His Stanford commencement
speech
stands as one of the most inspiring things I’ve heard.
My latest computer is a MacBook Air. I spend a lot of time on that
computer. A lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.
Godspeed, Steve Jobs.
Fog, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a fantastic
cloud computing library written in Ruby. It provides a unified interface
to several popular cloud computing platforms(including Amazon,
Rackspace, Linode, and others), making it easy to interact with them
from Ruby. It currently supports four types of cloud services: storage,
compute, DNS, and CDN. Fog has become very popular lately, and serves as
the backbone for Chef’s cloud computing functionality, which is how I
first became aware of it.
I recently used Fog to write a backup script in Ruby to automatically
send encrypted database backups from a database server running at
Rackspace to Amazon’s S3 storage service. Here’s how I did it.
Overview
My script runs as the second step in a process. The first step is a
shell script that calls pg_dump to dump a PostgreSQL database and then
encrypts the file using GnuPG, dropping them in a backup directory on
the database server.
My Fog-based script’s job is to make sure that all of the files in the
backup directory get moved to S3.
Writing Files
Fogsync (my script), looks at all of the files in that directory and
makes sure that they all exist in a bucket on S3. If they don’t, it
copies them up there. Additionally, it deletes old backups from S3. For
this customer, we keep backups for 14 days, so all backups older than
that get deleted.
Let’s look at how it works:
fog = Fog::Storage.new(
:provider => 'AWS',
:aws_access_key_id => MY_ACCESS_KEY,
:aws_secret_access_key => MY_SECRET
)
directory = fog.directories.get("MY_DIRECTORY")
files = Dir["/var/backup/*.gpg"]
for file in files do
name = File.basename(file)
unless directory.files.head(name)
directory.files.create(:key => name, :body => open(file))
end
end
Here’s what this snippet does:
Creates a connection to AWS. The syntax is basically the same for
connecting to all of the cloud platforms, just the parameter names are
changed.
Uses ‘head’ to check if the file exists and, optionally, get some
metadata about it (size, modify date, etc). Think of this as the cloud
equivalent to the unix stat command. You don’t want to use the ‘get’
command, as that will return the whole file, which would take a very
long time if the files are large cough*voice of experience*cough.
Creates the file in the given directory (“bucket” in S3 terms) if it
doesn’t exist already.
If you’ve used S3, you’ll notice that Fog uses slightly different terms
for things than S3 does. Because Fog works across a number of different
storage providers, it uses more general terms. While this might be
confusing at first if you’re familiar with a specific provider’s
nomenclature, but the tradeoff is that if you want to move from one
provider to another, the only thing you have to change is the code that
sets up the connection (the call to Fog::Storage.new() in this example).
Deleting files
oldest = Date.today - 14 (our date)
directory = fog.directories.get(MY_DIRECTORY)
files = directory.files
files.each do |f|
file_date = Date.parse(f.last_modified.to_s)
if file_date < oldest
file.destroy
end
end
This is fairly straightforward as well. Get all the files in the
directory and check their age, deleting the ones that are older than we
want to keep.
So that, in a nutshell, is how to use Fog. This is a simplified example
of course, in my production code the parameters are all pulled from
configuration files, and the script emails a report of what it did, in
addition to having a lot more error handling.
If you do any scripting with cloud computing, you owe it to yourself to
check out Fog.
This morning I was looking for a way to handle incoming email in a web
application (similar to the way Highrise and Evernote let you email
things to a special email address and have them put into their system).
There are a number of ways to do this via procmail, or by using
something to connect to your mail server using POP or IMAP and reading
emails, but I was looking for a way to do this without having to host my
own email infrastructure. Ideally, I want something like
Twilio, that will receive the email and then do an
HTTP POST to the endpoint of my choosing.
Here’s what I found.
Still in beta (and free while it is), this looks robust. It’s also
available as a Heroku addon, if that’s how
you roll.
(A tip of the hat to @peterc for pointing
me to this one)
Looks similar to CloudMailIn, though not in beta. There’s a free plan
for up to 100 emails a day, and then it goes up from there. Their site
was down when I first went to it this morning, which makes me a tad
nervous, but that may well be an isolated thing.
SendGrid
SendGrid is a heavy hitter in the email space, mostly doing outbound
delivery. They do however have a Parse API that seems to perform the
same function as the other two services. I’m not sure on the pricing
here, their basic plan is $9.95 per month for 10,000 emails, but I’m
not sure if that includes incoming or not. UPDATE: I heard from
SendGrid. Their plans cover both incoming and outgoing, so for the in
the case of the $9.95 plan, it could be a mix of both, up to 10,000
(thanks to Twilio’s @johnsheehan for
the pointer to SendGrid)
I haven’t used any of these yet, so I can’t make an endorsement of one
over the other, but I thought I’d post it here in case anyone else is
looking for this kind of provider. If you have experience with any of
these, please comment with your opinion.
Full-Ack: an Emacs interface to
Ack
Ack is a useful little app for searching
source code. If you ever use grep for finding things in your code,
switch to ack immediately - you won’t regret it. This is a handy front
end to ack for Emacs users.
Information architecture: A How
to
I’ve been learning about information
architecture
lately as it’s becoming increasingly important for my job. This is a
good overview.
Hacker’s Guide To Tea
I need to drink more tea. This article taught me a lot I didn’t know
about tea and its benefits.
Tasty Treats for PostgreSQL
A bunch of useful tools if you work with PostgreSQL, from the guys at
OmniTI.
HTML5Rocks - Introducing Web Sockets: Bringing Sockets to the
Web
An introduction to Web Sockets, which let you do lots of cool real time
things with the web. One of many things I need to spend more time
experimenting with.
Things You Should Do Immediately After Launching a Website
Some of these are common sense, but there are quite a few non-obvious
ones here. A good checklist.
Running Shells in Emacs: An Overview | Mastering Emacs
Working with shells in Emacs is very useful; I almost always have a
small one running at the bottom of my window to run commands in. This
explains the differences between the different kinds of shells in Emacs,
how to use them, and how to change their settings.
Announcing Cloud Load Balancing Private Beta | Rackspace Cloud Computing & Hosting
Rackspace Cloud, where I host a ton of different servers for myself and
for clients, has announced a beta of their load balancing service. Good
load balancing is a pain to set up, so this is promising.
The 1140px CSS Grid System/Framework · Fluid down to mobile
Nice new CSS grid framework that handles multiple screen sizes with
ease. It seems like a fundamental failing of CSS that we need all these
frameworks to do really basic stuff like this though.
Dr Nic’s Making CI easier to do than not to with Hudson CI and Vagrant
I need to spend some time with Hudson. It’s an
incredibly powerful “Continuous Integration” server, but it does a lot
more as well. This article explains how to use it in conjunction with
Vagrant to automatically set up your test
environment.
How to Use Your Zoom Lens as a Compositional Aid
I’ve been learning photography over the last couple of years. This
article did a better job of explaining the effects of using different
kinds of zoom lenses. The pictures that accompany the article are worth
1000 words and then some.
When budgets get tight, it can be difficult to provide adequate training
for your staff. Over the last couple of years, I’ve found some ways to
provide some training even in the face of a shrinking (or non-existent)
budget.
Regional conferences
If you still have some budget, but maybe just not as much as you are
accustomed to, look to smaller regional conferences as an alternative to
the larger national ones that are in major cities. If you’re fortunate
enough to live in a city where a conference is being held, you might get
out of having to pay for travel at all. This past year, the excellent
No Fluff Just Stuff
conference made a stop in our town, and I was able to send two
developers plus myself to it for a fraction of what it would have cost
to send them away somewhere and pay airfare and hotel on top of the
conference cost. I personally attended the Windy City
Rails conference this year which was a
single day for only $150. While the smaller conferences may not have
all the speakers you would get at a larger one, I’ve been really
surprised at the quality of the speakers that these conferences draw.
Books
My team has done this for the past year or so. I buy a copy of a book
for each person, and we meet once a week to discuss a chapter at a time.
Have people take turns leading the discussion. My experience has been
that these are most productive if you tackle a topic that your team
agrees is currently a pain point, as they can take the information they
learn and apply it to their current project. We’ve read through The
Pragmatic
Programmer,
Pragmatic Unit Testingin
Java,
and are going to move on to Don’t Make Me
Think
next.
Hashrocket has actually taken this a step further and broadcast these
live.
Videos
It’s become commonplace for conferences to record their talks and make
them available online for free. Additionally, a number of larger user
groups do the same. There are a nearly endless number of videos on a
wide variety of topics that are available online. Pick a video (maybe
two if they’re short), watch it as a group, and then discuss it
afterwards.
Here are a few sources I like:
Peer to Peer
We’ve done this even before our training budget shrank. Have people take
turns presenting on a relevant topic that they are passionate about.
This works well on a few levels: those listening get to expand their
knowledge, and those presenting will often develop a deeper
understanding of their topic. If a presentation is used, post it
somewhere so that people who join the company later can benefit.
So what have I missed? What do you do to keep your skills current when
you can’t get money for training?
Inspired by Mike Gunderloy’s recent blog
post, I
decided to put together a list of the tools I use, both hardware and
software.
I use a Mac at home and a Windows laptop at work; I plan to cover the
Windows tools in a later post.
Hardware
- MacBook Pro
My primary computer is a late-2007 17" Macbook Pro with 2gb of RAM
and a 160gb hard drive. I love this laptop, but I made two mistakes
when buying it. First, I should have gone with the higher
resolution display. If you’re going to have a 17" laptop, you should
have as many pixels as you can. Second, I way undersized the
hard drive. It was larger than the one in the laptop it replaced,
but since I have the three most adorable kids ever, I take a lot
more pictures and video than I did previously. This has quickly
filled up the hard drive, to the point that I’ll need to replace it
with a much larger one next year. To sum up: when buying a laptop,
get the largest hard drive and the most pixels you can afford,
unless you need ultra-portability.
- 24-inch Dell Monitor
Looks nice, and very affordable. Mine was refurbished. The picture
quality isn’t bad, but it’s one of their very low-cost displays and
is of lower quality than the rest of the line (I didn’t know this at
the time). If I was a graphic designer or professional photographer
I would probably care more. Since this primarily displays a code
editor, a terminal window, and a web browser, I don’t really
mind much.
- Apple Extended Keyboard
II
These are the legendary Apple keyboard you’ve heard about, and the
hype about them is true. I bought a couple of them gently used from
EBay and then scrubbed them with a brush and some dish soap to clean
them up. Paired with a Griffin ADB to USB converter, they work
very well. I’m a sucker for the old-style keyboard action.
- Mighty Mouse (bluetooth)
A lot of people hate this mouse, but I don’t understand why. It’s
solidly built, confortable, and has that cool little ball on top.
That said, I’m a keyboard junkie and avoid the mouse when I can.
- Time Capsule
This serves as both wireless router for the house as well as the
backup system for both laptops. I don’t have an off-site backup at
the moment, I need to look into that.
- Cambridge Soundworks Speakers
I really wanted the Klipsch computer speakers, but they’re more than
I want to spend. These sound good, and cost me only a little over
$100 refurbished.
Software
- Emacs
I learned programming with an IDE, but I learned to edit text
with Emacs. I’ve been using it for 10 years or so now, and it would
be difficult to switch. Every few years I have some brief dalliance
with another editor (the last one was Textmate, when I bought my
first Mac), but I always return to my first love. What emacs lacks
in style, it more than makes up for in substance. In one window I
can edit code, run shell commands (or a shell, for that matter),
edit files on remote servers, and much more. It’s endlessly
scriptable and insanely powerful. The fact that it’s cross platform
helps as well. My emacs configuration, which works the same (with a
couple of minor exceptions) on all the platforms I use it, is
located on Github
- Safari
I really want to like Firefox, but it’s just too slow. Safari is
quick, stable, and includes all the features I want.
- The Hit List
Even though it seems to be the popular thing to do these days, I’m
not on a continual quest to find The Ultimate Todo List App. I got
The Hit List as part of a MacHeist software bundle, and it
works well. I mean, seriously, what do you really need in a todo
list application? I can make items, I can check them off. The rest
is gravy.
- Adium
It’s not perfect, but I can talk to people on pretty much any IM
network out there.
- Tweetie
I used Twitterific for a couple of years, both on the iPod Touch and
OS X. Frankly, it was left to rot, with no updates for a very
long time. When Tweetie for the iPhone came out, I bought it
immediately and after using it for 10 minutes, concluded that I
wanted it for the desktop as well. I got my wish, and I’ve been
happy ever since.
- NetNewsWire
I do not read as many feeds as I used to. I mean, I subscribe to a
lot, I just don’t read them that often. My thoughts on why are
here.
When I do read feeds though, this is the app I do it in. I like that
I can navigate everything with the keyboard and send things to
Evernote and Instapaper easily.
- 1Password
I can’t remember all the passwords I create, or often even the
account names (sometimes it’s a username, sometimes it’s an
email address…). 1Password remembers them all for me and enters
them for me automatically as well.
- Evernote
I use Evernote to track all the little bits of data I accumulate:
code snippets, blog posts, how tos, meeting notes, PDFs,
presentations, etc. I like the fact that it syncs with other
computers, and it’s search works very well. I hate the way it
captures web pages though, it destroys all the formatting. Yojimbo
gets this right. It’s PDF viewing isn’t all that great either
- Skype
Skype works great if everyone is on a fast network pipe. It falls
down spectacularly if anyone is on a slightly flaky network
connection, like say a cell network connection. I use Skype mostly
for after hours deployments (group voice call), and video chats with
the Grandparents.
- iWork
I use Keynote for creating the occasional presentation and Pages for
creating things that require more formatting than a text document.
Numbers is the coolest application I almost never use.
- Terminal
I always have a terminal window open. Always. Usually more than one.
- Pixelmator
Photoshop is awesome, but it is both expensive and far more
complicated than I want. I am not an image editing guru, I really
just need basic capabilities. Pixelmator provides that - it’s
Photoshop for mere mortals.
Online
- Gmail
It’s got an amazing spam filter and supports IMAP and POP out of the
box (Yahoo still charges for this, for reasons I can’t comprehend).
I use the online client almost exclusively.
- Google Docs
I love being able to create spreadsheets and easily share them with
my better half. It does basically everything I need a spreadsheet
app to do, and it does it well.
- Pivotal Tracker
Oh, how I love Pivotal Tracker. It’s a simple but powerful project
management application that lets you keep track of features, bugs,
and chores. I keep all my side projects in here, under a seperate
account from the one I use at work. Any application I’ve built is in
here as a seperate project (this blog, for example). Any time I
discover a bug, or think of a feature I want to add, I can throw it
in here under the appropriate project and it will be waiting for me
when I have time to work on it. It’s nearly perfect.
- Instapaper
I read. A lot. Instapaper lets me capture things that I want to read
later, and conveniently strips out all of the formatting for me. The
iPhone application is great as well, I can carry reading material
with me anywhere.
Hosting
- VPSLink
I’ve been hosted with these guys for a couple of years. Fast VPS
servers and great uptime.
So that’s what I use to do what I do. If you’ve done a similar list, add
a comment below with a link. Or if you have a recommendation for
something to replace one of my tools, I’m always looking for cool new
tools.
Generating semi-realistic test data for an application can be a pain. If
the data already exists, as in the case of an upgrade to an existing
system, you can generally create data based on the existing database.
But what if you need a large sample of data for a brand new system? If
you have simple data requirements, there are some Ruby gems that can
help you out. Faker is one such gem,
which lets you generate realistic names, addresses and phone numbers.
But what do you do for things that are a little less typical? Things
like scores, ratings, ages, dates, etc. I needed to do this recently for
a prototype I built of a system to generate letters. Here’s the Rake
task I ended up with:
This script adds 1000 records to my database that are representative of
what real production data would look like. The quantity of data is
obviously easily adjusted up or down as needed.
This is just a standard rake task that you can drop inside lib/tasks.
Most of this is fairly standard ruby code and not very interesting, but
lets look closer at what makes this work.
The first portion of the script does some setup work, deleting existing
data. Then it sets up a series of arrays for the values that will be
used for individual fields. For example the volumes variable:
volumes = (8000..100000).to_a
This creates an array of integers containing every number between 8000
and 100000. Response rates and variances are set up similarly, as are
the client names.
In the loop that generates the actual data, we then call the
rand() function on these arrays to select a value from our
range. This function isn’t a standard part of the Ruby Array class, it’s
actually added to the class by
ActiveSupport.
Using this method makes it very easy to generate test data within
predefined acceptable ranges.
For another take on this topic, see the EdgeCase
blog
I’ve been a bit heads-down lately, working on a super-secret project in
Ruby. More on that in the near future, but in the meantime I wanted to
share about a few things that I’ve started using.
Shoulda
When I started my new project, I wanted to try one of the new testing
frameworks for Ruby. The problem is there are a number to choose from.
What to do…
I settled on Shoulda. I
wish I could tell you that this was a rigorous process, that I evaluated
each framework carefully, learning about each one’s strengths and
weaknesses. I did not, I cheated. You see, a while back, Josh Susser did
just that thing. He called it the The Great Test Framework
Dance-off.
He settled on Shoulda, so that’s what I went with.
Shoulda is developed by Tammer Saleh of ThoughtBot, who have a number of
other really nice projects.
Shoulda’s tagline is “Making Tests Easy on the Fingers and Eyes”, and it
lives up to that goal. It has a very nice syntax for developing tests,
including a complete set of macros for testing controllers and models.
It’s a joy to use. Here’s what it looks like (both samples taken from
the Shoulda README :
Nice, right?
Here’s a sample of the ActiveRecord macros in action:
Beautiful.
So what’s the big deal? Well, it’s easier to read for one. Instead of
horrendous method names like test_should_do_this_but_not_that, you
get to write English: should “do this but not that”. The macros in
Shoulda also let you test your models and controllers easily.
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is an Agile project management tool, developed by the
folks at Pivotal Labs. It lets you create
projects, track release, stories, and defects. The beauty of Tracker is
it’s all-on-one-screen user interface. It lets you see everything at a
glance, and even provides keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. I’m not
alone in my admiration of Tracker, it seems to be extremely popular
among the Rails consulting shops (Hashrocket,
for one).
While Tracker is powerful enough to be used for large multi-developer
projects, it also happens to be perfect for managing your side
projects. Enter the features you want, organize them into releases, and
just click start to begin the first one. Click finish when you’re done,
and move on to the next one. Easy peasy. Did I mention it’s free?
Be sure to check out the
screencast, which gives a
nice overview of the application.
HTTParty
John Nunemaker is a prolific Ruby and Rails developer, as witnessed by a
quick glance at his Github page. One of
his most recent projects is HTTParty, which makes it dead-simple to
consume REST apis using Ruby. Here’s what it looks like:
HTTParty automatically detects whether the response is JSON or XML and
parses it appropriately. It really doesn’t get much easier than that.
There’s also a nice command-line app bundled with the gem that lets you
call RESTful web services easily from the command-line, with a few more
bells and whistles than curl.
Sinatra
Sinatra is a great, compact web framework similar in concept to Why the
Lucky Stiff’s Camping framework. It makes it trivial to create a web
application in just a few lines of code. It was originally written by
XXX to allow for creating lightweight web services, but has since become
quite popular as a web framework to use when Rails might be overkill.
It’s easy to create simple test applications for libraries, but also
robust enough to create full-blown websites with. Check out the Sinatra
website and the Sinatra
book for more details.
What tools have you discovered lately?