Favorite Tech

I am always working with different projects and technologies so here are some of my favorite projects and tools so far this year.

Vagrant and Puppet

If you are not using virtual machines for development and testing then you are a fool. There is no reason to run code on your local machine when you can reproduce your production configurations in a virtual machine. Vagrant allows you to quickly spin up new boxes and Puppet manages provisioning your boxes and production servers easy and consistently.

When I want to test a new database or mess around with a new package I always spin up a new box with Vagrant and do my testing in a contained environment so that I don't kill my server or development machines.

Vagrant Puppet

Editors

I have been using Sublime Text 2 a lot over the past few months. However I have noticed that when working with a few large projects and a few different windows open with these projects it really slows down. Not just switching back and forth between windows and files but typing; that really bothers me. So I am back in Vim for my editing needs. I don't use gVim but Vim from the terminal because that is where I spend most of my time.

If you take the time to learn and configure Vim then it will be your best friend. You just have to invest in the editor, something that others do not have the time or patience for.

Vim

Redis

Redis is an awesome key value store that keeps the entire dataset in memory. I have been using redis as a work queue because of the awesome PUSH and POP commands for working with lists. You can see how powerful redis is just by viewing the commands. Redis is like a developers swiss army knife, it has many different tools to solve many different problems. It is not only efficient as a data store but also efficient to program for.

You can checkout my redis queue package for Go on github.

Redis

Backbone.js and Bootstrap

Even though I would rather be writing low level code or building apis I still have to write html and js for web projects. Backbone.js makes this simple and structured. Backbone.js is a client side javascript mvc framework for interfacing with a backend RESTful api that adds structure to javascript.

Twitter Bootstrap is a html, js, css framework for building web apps. It is so awesome and helps you produce great looking pages with minimal design skills. It includes many javascript and html components to use that make working on a web project simple while keeping a high level of quality.

This takes me to an aside, I believe the way to build web applications now is with static html and a client side mvc framework with a RESTful api on the backend. Using a client side mvc framework creates a clear separation between a view layer and your backend code. You cannot hack anything into view data, session, or whatever you crappy developers do. On the client side you only have the data and interactions provided by the backend api. Backbone.js allows you to split development between frontend developers and the backend developers working on the domain model and services.

This also makes sites very fast. Instead of rendering templates on the server side, all the templates are rendered client side with simple api calls to the server for CRUD operations. This separation also helps you decouple your backend implementation from your frontend view layer. Because the frontend connects to the backend via a JSON api you could change your entire backend's framework, implementing language, or scale horizontally without the tight coupling that you get when rendering templates server side.

This also makes deployments easy. If you have client side changes you can just push the new html and javascript to the server and you are done. No need to compile your backend code for frontend changes.

Backbone.js Bootstrap

CoffeeScript

CoffeeScript is a simple and elegant language that is compiled into javascript. We all know that javascript sucks and CoffeeScript aims to make it better. Here is some simple CoffeeScript with Backbone.js.

class FeedList extends Backbone.View
    el: '.feedlist'

    render: ->
        view = @
        feeds = new Feeds()

        feeds.fetch(
            success: (feeds) ->
                template = _.template($('#feedlist-template').html(), {feeds:feeds.models})
                view.$el.html(template))

Now lets see what this compiles down to:

FeedList = (function(_super) {
  __extends(FeedList, _super);

  function FeedList() {
    _ref7 = FeedList.__super__.constructor.apply(this, arguments);
    return _ref7;
  }

  FeedList.prototype.el = '.feedlist';

  FeedList.prototype.render = function() {
    var feeds, view;
    view = this;
    feeds = new Feeds();
    return feeds.fetch({
      success: function(feeds) {
        var template;
        template = _.template($('#feedlist-template').html(), {
          feeds: feeds.models
        });
        return view.$el.html(template);
      }
    });
  };

  return FeedList;

})(Backbone.View);

This is a huge difference, which one would you rather write? When you find a part of your job that is a pain, look for tools that will help. Web development is changing a lot and you (or the people in charge) are the only ones prohibiting you from performing your job efficiently and actually having fun. There tools are out to help you write better code, with fewer bugs, and enjoy what you are doing.

CoffeeScript;

Microsoft land

In the Microsoft world I have been using F#. It is really nice to look at problems from the functional perspective. I am super lazy so instead of writing documentation for an assembly I wrote a small class that will iterate over an entire assembly and create instances of any type (no matter if they have complex constructors) and extract documentation and other data from the types. I initially wrote it in C# and it was around 370+ lines of code. I decided to rewrite it in F# and dropped the line count to 85. It is very fast and efficient to code in.

Rant I think that is everything for now. Oh ya, everything on this list is open source and free to use. Fuck vendor lock and drinking the koolaid of using shitty tools because that is just what we use. Use the best tool for the job, shit tools produce shit product and is a pain to use.

Other articles

Golang JSON RPC

Tue 23 April 2013
By Michael Crosby

In go.

Go's rpc package has an example for the default rpc implementation but nothing for the jsonrpc package. Here is how to get it work. The rpc example uses some helpers built into the rpc package, I just looked at that code in Go's stdlib to figure out the ...
read more
Go Lang

Fri 12 April 2013
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

If you don't know about Go it's a programming language for now. Most of the languages that we use everyday are old, 10+ years old. After so many years languages need to start to think about news ways to solve the same problems. Go is a new language ...
read more
SecureString How To

Sat 09 March 2013
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Working with the SecureString class in .NET is fairly easy. This class allows you to keep string data encrypted in memory. Maybe you load connection strings, passwords, or financial data into memory when your application starts or loads an object so the least you can do is use the SecureString ...
read more
F# Url Shortener

Sun 27 January 2013
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Every year I try to learn a new language. If you are a one trick pony you are not only limiting your self in opportunities but you are also limiting your thinking to the one paradigm that you know.

So this year I wanted to learn something very different from ...
read more
Infrastructure - Part 1

Sat 29 September 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Servers

Running your own infrastructure is awesome, if your a hacker like me. If your a square and you don't want to mess with your own hardware you have two choices if you are going to host your website or services online. If you don't feel like spending ...
read more
Usage Patterns

Fri 28 September 2012
By Michael Crosby

In productivity.

Update: I will have updated graphs in a day or two. My time tracking app was only exporting the top 10 applications and I just found the setting to export the top 25.

I always have an app running on my computer that logs all the time I spend in ...
read more
Development Infrastructure

Mon 10 September 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Having servers that automate much of your development process is cool. Entities living out on the web just waiting to process any task that you throw their way.

I currently have two servers in my cluster that run my network. Everything from my public web sites, to mongodb and Postgresql ...
read more
web.py server setup

Sat 04 August 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Python is my favorite language to work with. It is so versatile. I can automate tasks, write quick scripts, process data, and even run a web application. It is very portable and I love the syntax. For a web framework I use web.py because it stays out of your ...
read more
Objective - C LINQ

Fri 06 July 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

I have been working on two iOS applications over the past few days and have been longing for a LINQ like syntax in Objective-C. LINQ is an amazing way to work with collections and it really adds a productivity boost to your coding. Since Objective C does not have LINQ ...
read more
Objective C Design Patterns - Factory

Mon 21 May 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Design patterns can help you solve complex coding problems with proven solutions. This will be a mini series about different design pattern implementations in Objective - C. I will be using a simple console app and updating the code on github with each new pattern.

Factory Pattern

This pattern provides a ...
read more
CodeAssistant

Mon 14 May 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

My second application was published this week.

CodeAssistant is a simple tool to test code snippets in virtually any language on Windows. It has been in development for four months and has been a great learning experience for domain driven development and .NET's WPF.

The application is build on ...
read more
Setup Ruby on Rails with Nginx and Unicorn

Mon 27 February 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

I lost an entire day of coding trying to get his to work. We are all lucky that I am a developer and not a systems admin.

However around 9pm I finally have it running. I burned through a lot of screwed up VM's trying to get this to ...
read more
Multithreading in C#

Sat 28 January 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

From my point of view the reason why we create multithreaded applications is so the user experience does not suffer. We have operations that need completed but running these on the main thread will block the UI and piss off our users.

Most of the operations have some similarities. Atleast ...
read more
tCal - iCal events in terminal

Sat 14 January 2012
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

I just puked up some old code for a little app that displays your iCal events in the terminal. I have it as one of my startup scripts so when I start a new bash session I see my events for the next 7 days. It's a very simple ...
read more
Bash Informational Startup

Fri 11 November 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

If you use Terminal on your Mac like I do. It is the first application that is run at starup and the last to close. When you start Terminal in a new window or tab that is a great time to review your computer stats, iCal events, and disk sizes ...
read more
Compile Vim for Python

Thu 13 October 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Update

I just added the newest MacVim compiled for python using the 10.7 Lion SDK. You can downloading it below.

If you want to use the Python auto complete in vim then you have to compile vim for python on your system. If you are running OSX I have ...
read more
Python talking to Arduino

Sat 08 October 2011
By Michael Crosby

In arduino.

I just setup my Arduino with an LCD display. You can follow the tutorial here to get the LCD and board wired up. We will also be using the sample code from that tutorial.

The Problem

The issue that I ran into was displaying messages from the Arduino IDE's ...
read more
How to backup gmail the right way

Tue 04 October 2011
By Michael Crosby

In productivity.

So like many people my life is stored in my gmail. I trust google to keep my data safe but since so many things, from contacts to many different online accounts, are all registered under your gmail address it is important to have that data whenever you need it. There ...
read more
How to manage your website with git

Wed 28 September 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

So this is much easier if you have a static site that is generated using pelican or jerkyll. Both of these apps are great for generating blogs out of markdown or other simple text markup language. I use pelican because it is built with python and that is what I ...
read more
AVAudioPlayer Memory Leak

Sun 11 September 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

This is a little bug in the AVFoundation framework. When using the AVAudioPlayer in you will get memory leaks when running in the iOS Simulator but not on devices.

It is a pain whenever you do most of your testing on the desktop during development and then start testing on ...
read more
My Creations

Thu 01 September 2011
By Michael Crosby

In my-apps.

CodeAssistant

CodeAssistant is a quick and simple desktop application to run code snippets. Have you ever been messing with a new API and you just want to execute one routine to see the output? Just throw your code snippet into CodeAssistant and it will run and display the output. It ...
read more
SVN to GIT and Extracting Individual Projects

Mon 15 August 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

This post is still not formatting. I switched from worpress and this is a long post and have not had time to update it.

So here is the issue. You first started to use version control and because you were coding solo and the low learning curve, you started to ...
read more
Setup your own Git Server over SSH

Mon 08 August 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

The thing about dvsc that makes me nervous is that all the code and revision history is on your local computer. This makes it very fast when committing, branching, and merging but what if you have a drive failure or worse? All your code is gone if you don't ...
read more
Flex 4.5 vs Pure AS3

Sun 07 August 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

I have built a few applications for Android using the Flex framework. It is a great framework and I can build, test, and publish apps very quickly. It takes productivity to the max.

However, I have noticed that some of my apps take a noticeable time to launch on my ...
read more
Setup Password-less Login over SSH

Sun 07 August 2011
By Michael Crosby

In dev.

Everyone needs a fast instance in a datacenter to work with. Amazon's EC2 or any other VPS provider will give you access. Sometimes you need to transfer files around fast or do some data processing. Having a fast instance will help you get your job done faster.

I have ...
read more

Other articles

Servers

Factory Pattern

Update

The Problem

CodeAssistant

This post is still not formatting. I switched from worpress and this is a long post and have not had time to update it.