The Able Few Blog

Introducing Schemata

Posted by Spencer Markowski

April 13, 2011

Schemata is a gem for corralling schema definitions across projects. As we work on new projects a lot of common field requirements come up ( addressess, contact forms, medical forms ) but its rare that the field names are ever implemented the same. Its a minor issue, but a major pet peeve of mine is when 'email_address' is defined as 'email' or 'phone_number' defined as 'phone' (Don't get me started on street_address_1 and all of its relatives ).

So with schemata you define the fields once and then they are available to use in your migration files.

gem 'schemata'

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The Able Few Visualized

Posted by Spencer Markowski

February 10, 2011

I came across the most amazing tool today: gource. It analyzes git logs and creates a time-lapse of commits -- which is pretty sexy once you throw in gravatars and directory names. Check out how we worked like busy little bees on a couple of our latest projects.

missouriwine.org

tlg8gear.com

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Google sets sights on Apple with a Pun

Posted by Mike Bishop

February 3, 2011

Google launched the Chrome OS site and takes a stab at Apple. When prompted by the Bot for how to destroy the laptop, say "William Tell"

Isn't the object of that stunt to miss the head of the subject the apple is resting on?

Or is google trying to tell us all "don't get caught in our cross hairs".

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Type Foundries Will Eat Themselves

Posted by Mike Bishop

February 1, 2011

As designers and developers, we are locked in a constant battle to try and maintain a quality user experience. Slowly over the years, elegant solutions to common problems have slowly crept into the market and have made the overall production and management of this ever evolving product more feasible and enjoyable.

Read the rest of this post »

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Colorized Ruby on Rails Logs.

Posted by Spencer Markowski

January 24, 2011

I can't tell you how much we hate sorting through Ruby on Rails logs looking for logger messages. This results in cruft like:

logger.info("========")
logger.info( "What am I made of? #{@someobject}")
logger.info("========")

Yuck. You know you do it too. So here is our solution:

Create config/initializers/logger.rb and drop this beauty in there. It will create two extra methods on Logger. Logger.dbug and Logger.colorize which will output a nice colored background on your message when invoked.

I made a Ruby gist for you.

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Seedbed -- A better way to manage seed data.

Posted by Spencer Markowski

January 20, 2011

Seedbed is an easier way to manage development data and store that data in a repository friendly format. Seedbed automatically generates rake tasks for all available data in the db/seeds folder or you can just run rake db:seed to invoke all seeds specified by 'plant'

gem install seedbed

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Black Iron Pipe Desks

Posted by Spencer Markowski

January 16, 2011

We're in a nesting period for our new home at 2603 Cherokee -- check out the time lapse of our team building some super sexy black iron pipe desks.

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The Able Few +1

Posted by Mike Bishop

October 21, 2010

Just a quick note, we'd like to introduce to the latest Able member. Please join us in welcoming Dustin Fadler to the team! Dustin is joining the ranks as a Junior Developer with a serious hunger for this Ruby on Rails stuff. We're proud to have him along for the ride and expect great things from him.
Welcome aboard Dustin!

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