TimShadel.com

With this week’s T-Shirt Tuesday, we’ve launched our first t-shirt for kids.

Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the CodeSmack blog to hear about our featured (read discounted!!) shirts and the stories behind some of them.

I setup a Campfire account for my RailsConf 2007 visit. Guest access is on, so come on over. It’s a free basic account now, but if more people come I’ll try to upgrade it as needed (if it gets big I’ll post a donation link). So come on by and chat.

May 17 Morning Tutorials

Scaling Rails
script.aculo.us
Test Driven Development
JRuby

In a couple hours I’ll be catching a plane to Portland to attend RailsConf 2007. I’m stoked to hear the presentations, and talk to others that are using Rails every day. It’s gonna be a great Ruby feast, to be sure.

If you want to meet up, contact me through my website or just look for anyone wearing a CodeSmack t-shirt. Chances are good on the first day that it’s me. We’ll have some for sale, so if you wait until Saturday your chances of finding me solely by the t-shirt will be diminished.

I’ll be updating my RailsConf schedule this afternoon and tonight. I’ll try to keep it current during the conference as well. Hope to see you there!

CodeSmack: Announcing T-Shirt Tuesdays

1. We will design new shirts and release them on Tuesdays
2. We will sometimes feature existing t-shirt designs
3. We will discount the t-shirts featured on Tuesday until the next Tuesday

Head on over and see this week’s newest designs and featured shirts, including one of my new favorite designs: Ready. Fire. Aim. (Hint: listen to its inspiration from RailsConf 2006) Buy ‘em this week and you’ll get a $2.00 discount over normal prices. Enjoy!

I gave a presentation tonight on JBoss Rules to the Phoenix JUG. There was a good group of people there, and we had a very lively discussion around some of the strengths and weaknesses of rules engines in general. It was fun to cover a topic that I don’t hear much of (outside of sales pitches), and to see so much interest. There were a log of thoughtful questions, and many people were interested in ideas of how to program using rules.

At work, we use JBoss Rules for a small portion of our code but that code handles an awful lot of our transactional complexity. Spring, Hibernate, and Struts handle most of the heavy lifting of our structure. But JBoss Rules helps keep our routing logic and call script questions fairly clean and maintainable.

While a lot of the value of a presentation is in the verbal exchange that goes on in the room, I figure there’s something to be gained by gazing through the slides and sample code after the fact. With any luck, I’ll take some time in the next couple weeks to put up some podcasts (gasp!) on JBoss Rules. Enjoy.

Presentation: rules.pdf
Source Code: jboss-rules

We are pleased to unveil to you, codesmack.com, home of the funniest programmer t-shirts. We have over 15 different designs that can be paired with different shirt/color combinations to dress you out in style. Our designs try to bring humor to the IT world, promote good programing practices and add a little good natured smack talk to your wardrobe.

We welcome any feedback you have regarding the site design (treat it gently; it’s brand new), t-shirt ideas, or any other comments you would like to make. If you like a shirt, we won’t even complain if you buy one (or more).

Hope to see you in a CodeSmack t-shirt!

–Tim and Aaron
http://codesmack.com

With this little announcement we let our family, friends, coworkers, and open source associates know what we’ve been up to for the month or so. We’ve got a great selection of designs started, with plenty more to come in time. Digg your favorites soon and you just might get a chance to pick one up at RailsConf.

Kaizen and Juice 2.0 – Juice Analytics

We built the new site using Python and Django.

I really like the Juice Analytics blog. These guys know their stuff when it comes to business analytics and data information display. They know all the big names, all the new tools, and they’ve got their own tips on top of that which makes it a great read. I really like their new site layout, and find it interesting they went with Python and Django. Most of my new stuff these days is Rails, but I have respect for anyone that makes a conscious decision about what they’ll use. And today, there’s a lot of power in light languages combined with flexible frameworks. Rock on, Juice.

I’ve been using Firefox for a long time. Last night I decided to give Camino a spin. I’m using a nightly build of what will become the 1.5 stable release later this month. This thing sings. It’s fast, feels lean and light, and it stores my passwords in Apple’s Keychain. Lovely.

There’s no way I can give up Firefox for development — Firebug is just too cool. I may, however, use Camino for normal “work” where I’m not trying to tweak the CSS, layout, or whatever of something I’m actually building. This dichotomy could perhaps become too burdensome; though I think QuickSilver will surely see to most of that concern. I could discover that I insanely miss the occasional GreaseMonkey thing, or I really miss…something. We’ll see. For now, I’m happy to have a zippy browser again.