It’s that time of year again to reflect and think about what’s coming up in the future.
This year was an interesting year, both personally and professionally.
Personal
We’re approaching our fourth anniversary of moving to Yakushima (it’ll be exactly four years this coming February), and we’ve been able to make more friends and acquaintances on the island. I’ve also taken up running as a hobby and have gotten involved in the local running community as well.
bundle install --without development:test
...
...
Bundle complete! XX Gemfile dependencies, XX gems now installed.
Gems in the groups development and test were not installed.
Now,
bundle install
...
...
Bundle complete! XX Gemfile dependencies, XX gems now installed.
Gems in the groups development and test were not installed.
Basically – you run bundle install --without <group> once, and that’s saved in .bundle/config. So next time you run bundle install without any arguments, it won’t install gems in the groups you specify.
Note: This blog post covers the legacy SSL Endpoint. Heroku now recommends the use of Heroku SSL, which can provide you with a free certificate and HTTPS (provided you are using the Hobby tier or higher).
If you use Heroku, you probably know a couple things:
As many of you probably know, I am a professional programmer. I started my professional career with WordPress and PHP development, and now I find myself doing a lot of Ruby work. I am still in the very early stages of my professional career – I have only been doing this for about 5 years. There are people who are much more experienced than I am, and there is a whole world of things that I have yet to learn and experience.
As you may know, I am a big PostgreSQL user and fan. I also use Homebrew to manage 3rd party software packages on my Mac. PostgreSQL 9.4 was just released a couple days ago with some really cool features – a binary-format JSON datatype for speed and flexibility (indexes on JSON keys? Of course.), and some really good performance improvements. Read the release blog post and release notes for more information.
Any web developer who works with external services or databases (that’s probably almost every web developer) has probably run into performance problems. The problem is that running code by itself is pretty fast. Databases and external services / APIs are very slow. Waiting on an external API to load is basically the computer equivalent of waiting for a brontosaurus to walk a kilometer.
As web developers, we have a very powerful tool called caching. It’s being used in your computer reading this sentence every microsecond, with various levels of caching happening between the CPU, memory, and hard drive (or SSD). The act of caching is saving the result of a slow operation in a easily accessible space. In this case, we will be talking about caching database results and API results.
I recently released my first app on the Mac App Store, Toki, and I decided that talking about the inner workings of the sync mechanism I’m using would not only be interesting, but helpful for me to think about some of the problems I’m having[footnote]This is inspired by the “Vesper Sync Diary” series of blog posts by Brent Simmons[/footnote].
Toki uses an App.net sync mechanism that I’ve been thinking about and working on for a while – I thought that Toki would be a good low-profile app to test out some ideas in real-world use.
Kerbal Space Program -- KSP for short – is an incredibly addictive game about… Space exploration! In the game, you are in charge of the space program on planet Kerbin. Kerbin is located in a solar system quite similar to our own solar system, with a few differences. I’ve been playing this game for a few months, and finally decided to write a blog post about my experiences and thoughts.
I noticed that most of the good discussion I was having about blog posts were on App.net. Turns out, many other people feel the same way, and there’s even an official App.net comments widget!
I’ve been testing a WordPress plugin to replace the default WordPress comments with ADN comments on this site for quite a while, so I decided to publish it in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Just search for “ADN Comments”, and it should be the first result.
I recently gave a quick talk about how I use Nginx, HHVM, MariaDB with WordPress on this blog at the March WordPress Meetup in Tokyo. Here are the slides:
I’ve published a Vagrant template for the setup detailed in the slides.
In my quest for faster response times and page load speed, I’ve been playing around with Google’s SPDY. I finally got around to getting a SSL certificate for this website and installing the latest version of the SPDY module for Nginx.
WordPress, alone, doesn’t really support SSL on all pages out of the box – here are some extra things you probably want to implement.
Redirect all non-HTTPS traffic to the HTTPS server. For example, this is what I use:
