About Me
I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, 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.
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Recent Posts
- Backup your Gmail
- Naming your business or product, forget the domain
- Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
- Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
- 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
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Category Archives: Technical
Backup your Gmail
Update 2017: I recommend using GMVault for backing up Gmail. It’s free, open-source, actively maintained, and relatively easy to setup if you’re technically inclined. Like all hosted services, you should never depend on one provider to both manage your data … Continue reading
Posted in Cloud Computing, Linux, OSX, Systems Administration, Technical
1 Comment
Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
At VolunteerMatch we’re experimenting with using Chef Solo to manage Amazon EC2 servers. The catch is that if a server is going to rely on Chef to boot up, then the Chef Recipes (which we’re storing in a Git Repository) … Continue reading
Posted in Cloud Computing, Java, Linux, Source Control, Systems Administration
2 Comments
Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
If you’re looking for the sample Standalone Cucumber Test Suite to get you started testing non Ruby based applications with Cucumber, here’s the source: http://github.com/thuss/standalone-cucumber. Sometimes you inherit a non Ruby based web app written in PHP, Perl, Java, C#, … Continue reading
Posted in Continuous Integration, Java, Quality Assurance, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Testing, Web
1 Comment
Code readability through conciseness
One of the things I love about newer languages like Ruby and Scala (and to a degree Python and Groovy) are the language features that allow you to dial conciseness up or down for readability. Take for instance the typical … Continue reading
Posted in Java, Ruby, Scala, Software Engineering
8 Comments
iPhone development the easy way
Update 8/7/2010 PhoneGap apps are still being allowed in the app store! It’s not the right solution for every app (for example we went native with the Common Sense Media app), but I still think PhoneGap is really cool. I’ve … Continue reading
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering, Web
Comments Off on iPhone development the easy way
Production MySQL performance tuning
For the past 9 years I’ve been working almost exclusively with MySQL (with a little PostgreSQL thrown in) and while I don’t do nearly as much DBA work these days, I still find myself troubleshooting a query or tuning my.cnf. … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
Comments Off on Production MySQL performance tuning
Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
At Common Sense Media I wanted to get some functional testing up and running that didn’t require a lot of user training for the QA folks. I also wanted those tests to run in our Rightscale/Amazon EC2 hosted Hudson continuous … Continue reading
Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
Update 8/7/2010: Standalone migrations is now a gem (sudo gem install standalone_migrations) so disregard the outdated installation instructions below Update 7/8/2009: With the latest batch of contributed patches standalone migrations now works just like Rails migrations Update 12/26/2008: I switched … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java, Linux, MySQL, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
5 Comments
Moving to 64 bit Ubuntu
After 3 Ubuntu upgrades on my primary workhorse (a Lenovo Thinkpad z61t) I decided it was time for a fresh install to remove all the cruft. In the past I’ve always used 32 bit Ubuntu (even though my laptop is … Continue reading
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