Matt

  • Learning Ruby on Rails

    Rails has been the popular framework for generating web applications for a long time now, yet I’ve managed to avoid learning it until this month. However a new job gave me an opportunity to dig in and learn it. Having come from several years of Python/Django development learning Rails shouldn’t have been difficult. Ruby has…

  • A Better In App Purchase Model

    A couple years ago I gave my girlfriend one of the best christmas gifts she’d ever gotten. It was a pair of tickets for a full day at the spa. The catch was that she had to gift the other ticket to one of her girlfriends.. the second spa pass wasn’t for me. I gave…

  • The Web Sucks

    I’ve been bouncing around between working on native Applications and web apps for the last few years. Having experience with the state of the art in both areas of software development. One thing I have found is that web development is not nearly in a state that programming a complex application is sensible. A modern…

  • Racing to 10% BF

    In the spirit of friendly competition, Colum and I are battling to be the first to reach 10% BF.  10%BF is a lofty goal that is difficult to achieve without serious commitment.  Winning will take everything I know and doing it all at once and staying committed to a lot of exercise as well as…

  • What Do You Know Soft Launch

    A week ago we did a soft launch of the new iOS game “What Do You Know”.  With very little marketing behind it we managed to push a couple thousand downloads of the game and brought in a little bit of revenue from IAPs and advertisements.  Knock-out successes out of the gate seem to be…

  • Code Reviews: Good or Waste of Time?

    I’ve been working with a team in Pakistan for the last couple weeks on a project which is starting to reveal itself to me.  It is an iOS game that’s nearing completion and should be ready to submit next week. Perhaps it’s just that as a professional software developer it’s hard to accept sub-par quality…

  • High Performance Static Websites on Amazon S3

    I’ve been seeing more frameworks lately for generating static websites. The reason for these becoming more popular recently is the result of several developments. Cheap shared hosting is notoriously unreliable, slow servers overloaded with too many websites and hacked servers being able to infect and hack many other sites at once. The development of 3rd…

  • Exercise for Programmers

    Staying on top of your game is best accomplished by continuously learning and by ensuring you are mentally and physically at your best.  As a desk jokey it can be difficult to get enough exercise in a day so you have to be pro-active about staying in shape outside the office. For several years I…

  • Cockiness of Programmers

    There’s no doubt that programmers are lazy people.  Anything that can be automated is, copy/paste code – you got it! There is another trait of programmers that they assume because they can program in one language well, and have touched a few other languages over the years they can quickly learn a new language on…

  • Bitcoin

    Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately and I’ve finally got into the game with a small investment to play with. Bitcoin is a new form of currency  which is technically quite ingenius but from an economic standpoint is quite unstable.  It’s basically a digital, anonymous, peer supported replacement of cash.  Each transaction…