A long while back I wrote a post about Twitter auth integration testing using Cucumber. Back then OAuth was just beginning to see widespread use, but it was nowhere near as popular as it seems to be today. In my latest side project, all logins are from Twitter or…

Amazon are the undisputed kings of the developer plumbing revolution. EC2 and S3 are so ubiquitious to deploying web applications that sometimes it seems difficult to remember when we had to self-host so much of this stuff. But sometimes managing my…

Manually deploying static site updates is so 2003. And Capistrano is great, but it’s an extra step you don’t always need (and somewhat overcomplicated). If you’re using Jekyll to power your site and already have your data in Git, it’s…

When I started on my first Angular+Rails project around 12 months ago, there wasn’t a lot of guidance around code organization, interop, and testing, and we got a lot of these things wrong. Since then, I’ve worked on several additional projects…

We’ve been making heavy use of Chris Wanstrath’s Resque library in my latest project. Resque is a Redis-based background job system that Chris built for GitHub. It’s easy to use, especially if you’re already leveraging Redis in other parts of your infrastructure, and also has a nice Sinatra front-end…

Apparently both Extlib and the Mash library, which the latest version of the Twitter gem relies on, both define Mash as a top-level class. This is lame.

It means that if you’re building an app that uses the Twitter gem to poll their API, you can’t use…

One of the new features we’ve been working on behind the scenes at Mogotest is a Google Analytics (GA) integration. By integrating with the Web’s most popular analytics service, we can…