About Me
I live in San Francisco and work as a Chief Technology Officer for small to medium sized web companies leading technical teams of 3-15 people. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Ruby, Scala, Java, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
Links
Hosting
I use DreamHost for hosting small personal sites. They are a mixed bag as all shared hosting providers are but for the price and storage they can't be beat. If you choose to signup use promo code GABRITO to save $50 on your first year.
For bigger websites which require load balancing, numerous app servers, database replication, CDN, etc I use the Amazon Cloud Services.
-
Recent Posts
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
- Moving to 64 bit Ubuntu
- 8 months off to Mexico and back
- Transcending CSS
- Simple CMS using Google Spreadsheet API
Categories
- Accessibility
- Agile Development
- AJAX
- Blogging
- Continuous Integration
- CSS
- Database
- Design
- Desktop
- FreeBSD
- Humor
- Java
- Javascript
- Life
- Links
- Linux
- Management
- Maritime
- MySQL
- OSX
- Quality Assurance
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- Sailing
- Scala
- Search Engine Optimization
- Software Engineering
- Source Control
- Systems Administration
- Technical
- Testing
- Travel
- Uncategorized
- WAP and WML
- Web
- XML
Category Archives: Design
Transcending CSS
Working at GreatSchools we do a lot of CSS work and we have a number of CSS books on our library shelf. However, last month we picked up a copy of Transcending CSS and it’s far and away the most … Continue reading
GreatSchools wins Webby People’s Voice Award
I’m thrilled that GreatSchools has won the Webby People’s Voice Award for best Family/Parenting site. We’ve been in the nominations before but I think continued growth and brand awareness through a largely redesigned site helped push us over the top … Continue reading
Deferring ad loading on your pages to avoid unnecessary outages
At GreatSchools we’ve had 3rd party ad server outages or slowness effectively make our site unusable as users browsers waited for certain ads to render before rendering the rest of the page. I had originally thought just specifying height and … Continue reading
Using image tags (for style elements) in HTML is bad design
Update 4/11/06: I’ve received some criticism on this post from people who assumed I was saying you should never use image tags in HTML. My bad for the misleading title, I’ve added to the title in parens to be more … Continue reading
Crawler side effects of using XHTML entity references
We’re slowly moving towards making GreatSchools XHTML compliant (we have a long way to go though)! To start we’ve begun using proper XHTML entity references for URL’s with & as a separator instead of plain old & in a few … Continue reading
Enhancements to subModal
I started hacking around with subModal (modal javascript windows with background shading) this morning to add some features I liked in Lightbox Gone Wild. You can try it out and download my changes to subModal here. They are
Hiring a web front-end engineer and a rant
Update 3/28/06: Still looking… not for a web designer but a web front-end engineer. Jemery does a good job of describing the distrinction. No doubt about it, this is a hot skill set that is extremely hard to find! I’m … Continue reading