Chris Oliver specializes in web development with Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML5, and CSS3
It’s been over 4 years now that I’ve posted my last blog post. That’s far, far too long! So what have I been doing over the past 4 years? I’ve been working on GoRails full-time. I often like to reflect back on things and see just how far they’ve come. I’ve learned an enormous amount in the past 4 years and want to share that with other people. The whole reason I started GoRails was to take control…
I read an article the other day talking about how mobile apps are becoming flooded with in-app purchases. He claimed that in-app purchases were a bad thing. He said they ruin the experience and target you when you in your weakest moment. Well, he’s right...for now. Today’s implementation of in-app purchases in many games are similar to the urge of gambling. I need to do just one more thing.…
I really, really enjoyed this talk. There were a bunch of great quotes in it tying skateboarding in with computers programmers/hackers: Take what other people do. Make it better. Give it back so we all rise further. And explaining exactly why so many people enjoy programming, skateboarding, making music, and any other type of creation: There is an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake…
I finished this programming book and I still don’t feel like a real programmer. What do I do next? This is a question that I get asked a lot having been involved in LaunchCode STL . There are a million things to learn, but we all have to start somewhere. Most people start with a book that takes them so far and then drops you off in the middle of nowhere when you’re finished. The answer to that is…
There are lot of blog posts on how laziness is a quality of a good programmer but you’ve gotta be a developer to find those blogs sometimes. I want to talk about evaluating the laziness of a programming consultant and how it can be a good or bad thing. If you know anything about building software, you learn very quickly that it’s a whole lot of trial and error. You make a change, refresh the…
I’ve had some fun recently playing Ryan Bate’s Ruby Warrior . It’s a little text based adventure game where you build the AI for the player. Each level gets increasingly more difficult so you start writing more and more complex code. As you go along, you can get caught in the complexity of the code, so I made this video to help give examples of how I was handling the first few levels of…
A lot of people are using Twitter Bootstrap these days and I can’t say I blame them. It’s incredibly easy to get a decent looking website built in just a few minutes and you can go back later and customize it to your liking. The problem is, a lot of people don’t take that second step and now you see a bunch of websites that all look generally the same. One of the first and easiest steps you can…
This interview with Paul Graham has a bunch of very awesome points he makes. Give it a watch and let me know what you think. “The reason hackers want to get rich is not so they can buy luxury items, it’s because they want freedom.” – Paul Graham This really hit home for me as a developer. “Focus groups can only tell you what they want. Well designed software delivers more than what people know…
My introduction to programming started in the 7th grade. My dad was cleaning an old bookshelf when he brushed off his old Atari Basic programming book. He handed it to me and mentioned I might find it interesting. We had an old Magnavox computer running DOS at the time. I took a guess that this book might help me write programs for that computer because we didn’t have an Atari. I sat down and…