In all things coding, as in all other problem solving, always strive to fix the root of a problem rather than patch the symptoms. Railscasts Episode #413, “Fast Tests”, is a truly fantastic, broadly applicable episode for all Rails devs. … Continue reading
First of all, ask yourself this: when you’re dealing with production data, even if you only have a single customer to serve (maybe it’s yourself or your organization), is there ever a time that it’s not mission critical? It’s always mission … Continue reading
NUBIC decided to do a FedEx Day (following the Atlassian model). It’s our first FedEx Day, and we had about 1/3rd of our staff build or collaborate on projects between the NUBIC software development and EDW groups. There was also unanimous … Continue reading
Update 3/28/2012: In order to manage server configuration and code deployments, I’m experimenting with a free, hosted Chef account from OpsCode.com. I’m also following this blog post for the application deployment-specific questions and solutions. ————————————- My technical project for the … Continue reading
Digital information is, without careful design, pretty leaky. It gets transferred all over the place, it gets logged, it gets backed up, and it often lives in those backups for a long time. This post discusses just one way that … Continue reading
It’s not the users’ fault. Honestly, it’s not. When answering a technical support question, have you ever asked someone, “Did you read the manual?” Well, put away your superiority complex for a moment, and realize that your users are wondering … Continue reading
NUBIC is the Northwestern University Biomedical Informatics Center in Chicago. Our developers write software, computation, and data analysis tools that support medical research. There is a famous blog post written by Joel Spolsky titled “The Joel Test.” It describes some … Continue reading