garrensmith.com
Monitoring your Unicorns and Resque with Bluepill and Upstart
http://garrensmith.com/2012/09/24/Staying-up-with-Unicorn-Upstart-Bluepill.html
Monitoring your Unicorns and Resque with Bluepill and Upstart. 24 Sep 2012 - Johannesburg. Deploying a new Rails application is quite easy and there is plenty of documentation on the web. However keeping it running is a little trickier. I'm no Linux system admin guru, so when I launched Classroom 7. I chatted to as many people as I could to make sure I was doing the right things on my servers. I was lucky enough to get Glenn and Dalibor of Siyelo. I initially took a look at Monit. For process monitoring ...
garrensmith.com
Curriculum Vitae Retrospective
http://garrensmith.com/2009/09/13/cv-retrospective.html
13 Sep 2009 - Johannesburg. I recently had to update my CV or for my American readers, my resume. Initially I had writers block so I avoided it for a couple days. However after some research I eventually stopped procrastinating and got down to it. A CV is always tricky business as you don't want to come across as a bragger or worse under sell yourself. Finding the correct balance is always tricky. Trying to keep it brief and insightful is important, along with making it appeal to your audience. I strongl...
garrensmith.com
Post Number 1
http://garrensmith.com/2009/12/07/Post1.html
7 Dec 2009 - Johannesburg. Wow, my first post. I think its only polite to introduce myself before I get down to business in the next posts. I've now been working for Driven Software. For one month. Its been a fantastic journey so far and I've been learning so much. My current role is as a scrummaster in one of the agile teams that Driven Software is coaching and helping. It's a great team to work with - a good code base and a really interesting project with lots of potential. With some XP methodologies.
garrensmith.com
The Perfect Kiss
http://garrensmith.com/2009/09/09/Perfect-Kiss.html
9 Sep 2009 - Johannesburg. The acronym KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is used a lot when talking about code. What does it actually mean and how do we actually adhere to this principle? Programmers justify many evil things in the name of KISS. Things like adding unnecessary complexity, procedural code and god objects. Spring to mind. And don't think that bundling code up in comments suddenly makes it all simpler. But what does it actually mean to keep your code simple? Says that s imple code:. This follows ...
garrensmith.com
Certified scrum master training day 1
http://garrensmith.com/2010/02/17/Scrum-Training-day1.html
Certified scrum master training day 1. 26 Feb 2010 - Johannesburg. I'm currently on the certified scrum master training course run by Peter Hundermark of Scrum Sense. Mobile, Web, Rails and Node.js development. Blog comments powered by Disqus. Developer and Founder at Red Comet Labs.
garrensmith.com
Silverlight Flash whatEva
http://garrensmith.com/2010/02/21/SilverLight-Flash-Whateva.html
21 February 2010 - Johannesburg. I've recently had to do a website. The awesomeness. need I say more. This is the first time I have used a css reset. I really liked it and I found it helped me with the website design. Was used to slide between sections in the website. Was used to display the pictures in the gallery. This had great flexibility to resize the images and had a really classy feel and suited the website perfectly. Oh yes, please check out the site and let me know what you think. link.
garrensmith.com
Announcing Jody, another BDD framework for node
http://garrensmith.com/2010/11/01/Jody.html
Announcing Jody, another BDD framework for node. 1 Nov 2010 - St Helena. I have been really interested in investigating Nodejs and Javascript. I decided the best way to get to know them would be to write some sort of library for it. I followed some advice. And reinvented the wheel and wrote a BDD framework. I've been reading a beta version of the Rspec book on my kindle so I've tried to use the knowledge I gained from that to help with the api of the framework. To install npm install Jody.
garrensmith.com
Couchdb Internals - The Prequel
http://garrensmith.com/2012/02/27/Couchdb-Internals-Prequel.html
Couchdb Internals - The Prequel. 27 Feb 2012 - Johannesburg. I'm currently taking the Introduction to CouchDB Development. Before I start diving into the internals of Couchdb I want to understand how to get Couchdb up and running, how to run its tests, the layout of the code and how to configure it. The wiki has a list of dependancies that need to be installed before looking at Couchdb. Using Homebrew. It was pretty simple. We need to checkout the code from its git repository. Bootstrap & ./configure.
garrensmith.com
Announcing Red Comet Labs
http://garrensmith.com/2011/08/01/Announcing-RedComet-labs.html
Announcing Red Comet Labs. 1 Aug 2011 - Johannesburg. Today is my first day at Red Comet Labs. So far so good. The dress code is quite relaxed, work seems interesting and the boss is quite a funny guy. Though I could be biased as I am the boss. I've spent the last 18 months working for Driven Software. And its been a fantastic experience. I've learnt quite a lot, especially working with developers and helping teams to achieve agile greatness! Mobile, Web, Rails and Node.js development.
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