Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • Taking Rails Lessons to Django

    For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a number of Ruby on Rails projects with some talented and experienced developers.  After years of working in the Django world on various projects, Rails is an interesting contrast. My perspective on developing webapps has changed greatly since working with Rails. This is both due…

  • New Site New Direction

    With the launch of the new design for this site we have also taken a new tack on the strategy going forward for future development of products and features.  The backend services that currently have been built for Halotis iOS Apps will be re-built so that others can benefit from the work done.  Where appropriate…

  • Building something bigger

    Halotis is in the process of a pivot. We’re re-writing all of the software developed for the backend of our mobile apps so that they can be opened up for anyone to use. We will be offering a host of BaaS style applications to make mobile development easier, more social and hopefully raise the bar…

  • Playing with Docker, Vagrant, Dokku for deployment

    I’m looking at launching a series of new web services in the future and that got me thinking about finding ways to improve my development and deployment workflow to make it super trivial to launch new services and APIs. Recent experience with Heroku’s PaaS got me looking in that direction. Pushing a git repository to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…