March 2010
7 posts
Hopping in the cloud
Hoptoad has been running on the Engine Yard cloud for more than a week now, with excellent performance. We’ve been looking forward to this for quite some time, and want to share a little about our motivations and experiences.
Why’d we do it?
Architectural flexibility
Currently, Hoptoad is a monolithic application, with the notification API, data API, and user-facing website...
Illustrating the landingpad.org helicopter
We recently launched Landing Pad, a site featuring the best and most beautifully designed iPad apps. We wanted the logo to be special and memorable - something beyond a type mark. A helicopter played off the idea of the landing pad and we quickly settled on “the one from M*A*S*H”.
Sketching
I found some reference material and started sketching. The sketching phase was particularly...
1 tag
Why Favicons Rule the Internet
Once upon a time, back in Internet Explorer 4, Microsoft produced something great (this is not a joke). They decided that when you bookmarked a favorite in your web browser an icon should appear next to its name. On a day sometime in or around 1997, the glorious favicon was born. Every browser since then has supported favicons, in the widely supported .ico format. Many browsers are now supporting...
1 tag
Introducing the iPad Design Showcase: Landing Pad
With the recent hires of Kyle Fiedler and Chad Mazzola, our design team has doubled in size. With these additions we’ve been given much more room to breathe and now have some time for cool internal design projects. One of our first endeavors is an iPad app design showcase, which we have tentatively named Landing Pad, we’ve even built a quick prototype that we’re still playing...
Redis: Data Cheeseburgers
Since we’re on a NoSQL craze in Boston this week, it’s about time we started talking about Redis. We’ll be using it on Hoptoad extensively soon, and it’s a truly useful project.
Explaining Redis is tough, it’s easy to say “a data structures server” or “memcached on steroids” or something more jargon filled. It’s not exactly a key value...
Write Fewer Regular Expressions
Oh man Cucumber is awesome but why do I have to write regular expressions? It’s always like:
Then /^show me the emails$/ do
puts ActionMailer::Base.deliveries.map do |email|
email.subject
end.join("\n")
end
Then /^I should see the "([^"]+)" link once$/ do |link_title|
assert_select '.deal_title', :text => link_title, :count => 1
end
Then /^I should see "([^"]+)" for...
Where to stay when you visit us
Hey! You!
You’re a hip Rails dev looking to expand your knowledge and hang out in Boston!
So come take our Rails training class April 7th, 8th, and 9th!
And while you’re here you could stay in these sweet hotels:
The Nine Zero
The Onyx
The Charlesmark
The Lenox
They do not come with totally deck sneakers and wild haircuts but they are near places that can help.
If...