Steve Sanderson

Food on the Table is Hiring!

stevesanderson — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:33:48 +0000

Food on the Table is hiring – I’m looking for a great developer to work with us. Read more at We Are Growing! | Food on the Table Blog.

MC and Talk at Austin On Rails Tuesday, September 28, 2010 @ 7-9 PM

stevesanderson — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:31:58 +0000

On the 28th, I’ll be MC’ing the Austin On Rails meeting - (Meeting: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 @ 7-9 PM).

There’ll be four talks:

Technical Feedback Loops – Marcus Irven
Product Feedback Loops – Ash Maurya
Process Feedback Loop – (me)
How My Community Saved My Life – Mando Escamilla

My talk will be a short version of my recent Lone Star Ruby Conf. talk “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” or why I love continuous learning with continuous deployment. (video)

Check out the talks and hope to see you there!

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine

stevesanderson — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:55:55 +0000

Gotta love this…

Progress Trackers in Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine.

Skype Will Not Verify Phone – Google Voice Help

stevesanderson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:47:19 +0000

FYI – we have a google voice number for Food on the Table -and forward it to our SkypeIn number. However, at some point we realized that it wasn’t working. No matter what we did, we could not get a call to go thrugh Google Voice to SkypeIn.

Fortunately, I found an answer we had Skype set so that it would only”Receive Calls to my online number” from people in my contact list.

http://screencast.com/t/OTMwNzUyM

via Skype Will Not Verify Phone – Google Voice Help.

Fix for: can’t use fluid with campfire anymore…

stevesanderson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:31:04 +0000

Now that 37signals centralized their user management, my existing Fluid-based campfire doesn’t work. Specifically, I can’t login because it keeps opening a new window in my regular browser to login, instead of completing the login within Fluid.

I googled for “can’t use campfire with fluid” and similar, and no luck. A little more digging and I found reference to Making Fluid Ssbs Browse Only Pages You Want – fluidapp | Google Groups.

All I had to do was to add *launchpad.37signals.com* to my whitelist of URL’s to browse in Fluid and it worked.

I’m posting this here so the next person may have a shorter route to find the answer.

Installing nokogiri Slicehost’s Ubuntu Hardy

stevesanderson — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:32:49 +0000

Here’s the steps to get nokogiri installed;

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
sudo gem install nokogiri
sudo gem install racc
sudo gem install rexical
(at this point, when I tried “gem install how”, it complained I didn’t have RubyGems >= 1.3.1. which is required for “hoe”)
sudo gem install rubygems-update -v=1.3.4
sudo update_rubygems
sudo gem install hoe

via Mark Howe » Rails requires RubyGems >= 1.3.1 you have 1.2.0. Please `gem update –system` and try again..

For Leopard, installing Sphinx from ports with mysql binary from mysql

stevesanderson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:57:50 +0000

Given I’ve installed sphinx

And I’ve used mac port for the install

When I run sphinx indexer

Then it expects the mysql socket to be in /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock

Given I’ve installed mysql

And I’ve used the binary from mysql

When I run mysqld

Then it use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock

To get sphinx indexer to use my installed version of mysql, I have to change make a change in the sphinx.conf file to tell sphinx indexer to use the mysql socket in /tmp/mysql.sock:

in some source …

{

sql_sock = /tmp/mysql.sock

…

}

Check sphinx_docs [SphinxWiki] for reference.

Please vote for my SXSWi Panel “Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques”

stevesanderson — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:58:26 +0000

Last day to vote for my SXSWi panel; please vote! “Lean Startups: Beyond the Hype, Successes, Failures & Techniques” http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3884

iPhone Voicemail Badness – why-oh-why AT&T #fb

stevesanderson — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:55:31 +0000

Noticing that I haven’t received any new voicemails in over a week – and hearing rumors about problems with voicemail on the iPhone… I reset my iPhone and after a reboot – ta-da! Over a weeks worth of voicemails suddenly appear. Grrr. Never seen this before and I’ve had my 1st generation iPhone for a couple of years

kanban development oversimplified + shiny bits on couchdb

stevesanderson — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:42:11 +0000

Lots of buzz lately about kanban / lean in software development. While watching this from the sidelines, I’ve also been looking at my current team and previous teams and gauging applicability.

With my current team (at FiveRuns), we hit a point a while ago where the team began to reject the extra formality and overhead in some of our scrum practices (e.g. sprint planning, release planning) and began to smooth our rhythm out until we ended up, more or less, as continuous-flow.

The great thing is, I’ve looked back on earlier teams and seen similar trends – but different results. This time (for me) reality & results were stronger than dogma & fear – so we went with what made us better.

Then, I stumbled across Kanban Development Oversimplified and passed it out – it’s a great quick & simple overview.

It’s not good enough to be doing something… I’ve got to build something related. So, combine this with the desire to get some more experience with some new shiny bits (standalone apps on couchdb) and ta da: a simple board with cards + columns to represent our worfklow (surely a cliched application, along with blogs); the board will be a centralized service and a de-centralized service (ref: git) so that people can take their own copy of the board with them – keep using it – and sync up with either the centralized service or another instance, as needed. More later: I’ll post some cucumber scenarios and then a link to the project on github.