Posts from BenCurtis.com...
Posted by Ben 10 days ago
I used to love the company Overnight Prints. They offer a great product at reasonable prices and with reasonable service. Until this week, I had no reservation about referring them to anyone who needed some printing done, and I saw no need to even shop around for any printing job I needed. [...]
Posted by Ben 19 days ago
A lot of us are building web applications that we sell (or hope to sell) to customers on a subscription basis, like Catch the Best. Every time you and I build one of those applications, we need to build a billing system to go along with it. I imagine you and I would [...]
Posted by Ben 45 days ago
Now Amazon’s EC2 supports static IP addresses that can be pointed at any of your instances on the fly. This is cool.
Posted by Ben 53 days ago
Many moons ago I wrote a quick status report on my first 100 days of Rails consulting. Now that it has been over a year since I joined the freelance world full time, I figured it was a good time to reflect again on that experience.
I said it then, and I’ll say it again—this [...]
Posted by Ben 60 days ago
I recently integrated the Scribd API with my resume management application, Catch the Best, so I thought I’d share a few details here about how I did that in case you are interested in using their great API.
To get started, first you need to install the rscribd gem and set up an account at Scribd [...]
Posted by Ben 62 days ago
This is cool… TaffyDB is an in-browser javascript database. This could be really useful for doing changes to a dataset without moving page to page, and then simply sending JSON back to a Rails or Merb app to save the changes.
Posted by Ben 71 days ago
Chris came up with this excellent little snippet, try, as seen on Ruby Inside.
That inspired me to a create a similarly sugary method for an idiom I use time and again:
class Object
##
# @person.name rescue nil
# vs
# @person.do_or_do_not(:name)
def do_or_do_not(method)
send method rescue nil
end
end
Posted by Ben 74 days ago
I am! According to Marcelo, who founded Sampa and blogs about the Seattle startup scene:
Most Influential Entrepreneur-Bloggers of Seattle
Thanks, Marcelo! My mom will be so proud. :)
Posted by Ben 81 days ago
I’ve had requests from time to time from other developers for the contract that I use with clients. Here’s the Terms section that I typically use. In addition to this section, I have sections that describe the work to be done, the payment schedule, and other info specific to each client.
Enjoy!
Sample Rails consulting [...]
Posted by Ben 104 days ago
I got an email from Amazon about their new WebStore by Amazon offering. Like Shopify, it’s a just-add-water storefront for people wanting to sell their products.
This seems like a natural step for Amazon, considering their recent product offerings like payment processing and fulfillment services.
Perhaps my days of building custom e-commerce [...]
Posted by Ben 104 days ago
Catch the Best got a mention in the Working Podcast, a great resource for career advice.
On a related note, StandoutJobs is getting a ton of coverage by virtue of being at DEMO, not to mention getting a $2 million investment. That should bring some welcome attention to the space addressed by hiring management tools [...]
Posted by Ben 108 days ago
Mark Stachiew, writing for the Montreal Gazette, mentioned Catch the Best in his latest Networthy column. Thanks, Mark!
Posted by Ben 131 days ago
Thanks to the contributions of a couple of people on the mailing list, and thanks to a client who wanted some Lorem Ipsum text to be generated, Faker 0.3.0 has been released.
Here are the changes:
Added Lorem to generate fake Latin
Added secondary_address to Address, and made inclusion of secondary address in street_address optional (false [...]
Posted by Ben 149 days ago
The past couple of weeks I’ve had the good fortune to work with a great client on a Rails app that gets a lot of traffic. His server was groaning, and the wheels were starting to fall off the cart. So we dug in. And when we were done, we had a [...]
Posted by Ben 171 days ago
My first gem! :) This is a simple one—a port of Perl’s Data::Faker. It’s useful for generating fake data, like names, addresses, etc. Check out Faker’s home page or install via gem install faker.
Posted by Ben 188 days ago
Marcelo Calbucci recently posted the Seattle Startup Index, and Catch the Best ranks near the middle of the pack. One of the things I love about being in Seattle (along with the fantastic summer weather) is being among such a great crowd of people building cool businesses.
On an amusing note, for this month’s rankings [...]
Posted by Ben 205 days ago
What are “spaghetti products”? This phrase came to me as I was trading emails with John Cook from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while he was working his piece, Ready, startup, go! Services built in cyberspeed, in which my project Catch the Best got a mention. It’s a play on the method of checking to [...]
Posted by Ben 212 days ago
From time to time I get emails from people asking for some lessons I’ve learned in my time as a Rails freelancer, so I thought I’d jot some notes down for all to enjoy. Despite the title, these tips aren’t really Rails-specific. :)
Marketing: One question I often get is “how do I market myself?” [...]
Posted by Ben 215 days ago
If you were secretly wishing for yet another Rails conference to happen, wish no more, for acts_as_conference is here! Personally, I’m excited about it, for a few reasons.
First, it’s being put on by the fine Rails for All folks, and they do good stuff. Second, this looks like it’s going to be a [...]
Posted by Ben 221 days ago
If you’d like a quick and dirty UPS rate calculator to use in your Ruby/Rails projects, check out this bit of code I did, based on the great shipping gem:
http://pastie.caboo.se/103505
Changes from the shipping gem include replacing REXML with Hpricot and adding a method to get a list of available methods and rates for a particular [...]
