centresource interactive agency

This past Sunday, the Tennessean published an article around the recent surge in mobile application development in Nashville. One of those interviewed was one of our most recent clients, PureSweat. PureSweat offers specialized basketball training and development programs to top high school, college and NBA players. Their program enhances player's skills and fundamentals, which allow them to be successful at any level. PureSweat's owner, Drew Hanlen is currently finishing up his senior year at Belmont University. We wish Drew and the rest of the Belmont team huge success during the March Madness season. We are very excited to have the opportunity to work on such an amazing product and driven entrepreneur.

Continue reading "Tennessean: Mobile application market heating up"...

OK, I'll be the first to admit it - math is my favorite subject. I know that makes me weird - even among fellow working software engineers - but it's the truth. It's also the truth that while they may be boring to many, knowing even a little bit about the numbers of computer science can help make you a better software engineer. Today, we're going to look at a little piece of applied discrete math - the analysis of algorithms - and how we can empirically describe the performance of one algorithm with respect to another using something called "asymptotic notation". If you already know what this is and how to read the various sub-notations, skip the rest of this post: it's old news. If you do not know what this is, and would like to, read on! If you do not know what this is and don't care, read on anyway - I promise you it'll be worth it.

Continue reading "Freakin' asymptotic notation: How does that work?"...

Recently, Unmatched Style sponsored some "Friendly Markup Fisticuffs" where they issued design files to whoever wanted to compete, and the competitors would have two weeks to create a website using only their brains and their computers.  The rules were pretty straightforward: one page only necessary, all external libraries (jQuery, et al.) had to be included, and your submission had to run locally. Otherwise, go nuts.

The judges would then review your work and score it based on code (cleanliness, semantics, and validation); user experience (respect for design, good choice points, interactions); and support (modern browsers, legacy browsers, size of project, resource optimization).  In the judges hands rests the responsibility of deciding one grand prize winner, 2 second place winners, 2 third place winners, and 20 runners-up.

Continue reading "CSSOff"...

Starting out in web development, one fundamental truth that was difficult for me to understand is that there is no silver bullet for all client challenges. It was initially very easy to get comfortable building one kind of website with one tool; however, when a new challenge came along that tool wasn’t always the right one for the job. As a nascent programmer, I fell into the “when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail” mindset for one reason: I was pretty unsure of my skills. If I was able to do something well, fast, and it made clients happy then I did not want to stray from that comfort zone. But that model was unsustainable in a constantly changing field. Fundamentally, after a few years of development work, if all you have is a hammer then it may be time to consider a job besides carpentry. To move beyond this hammer mindset, a sense of aloofness and open mindedness are necessary.

Continue reading "Technology Agnosticism and its Significance to Me"...

No planning, no documentation, no problem. That is the Agile development approach right? Well, I might be new to this Agile approach, but I would argue it's MORE. I am a Project Manager by heart, so NO planning and NO documentation is simply unacceptable. Sorry Dilbert. Seeing how Agile Development is a buzz lately, I figured I would approach this topic from a Strategist’s point of view.

Continue reading "Dilbert Knows Agile"...

Just a quick note that VentureBeat quoted me in regards to FourSquare's new RADAR feature. Long story short, geo-fenced tips/notifications are cool if they are "opt in". If they herald the beginning of geo-advertising alerts, I think it could hurt the platform (anyone remember Facebook's Beacon fiasco?).

You can read the article on VentureBeat.

Part II of this video continues by using a demo application to go into detail on how to incorporate Angular.js into Rails 3.1 to build cleanly architected, maintainable web applications with rich user experiences.

Angular.js + Rails: Part 2 from centresource interactive agency on Vimeo.

1. What tools do you use daily in the course of your development, and why those tools in particular?
   1. Textmate. Q: How do you start an argument in a room of developers? Ask them "what texteditor is better and why?" I’ve always subscribed to the classic “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it” train of thought on this. Before I used Textmate, I couldn’t stand the editor I was using (possibly JEdit or Aptana or something else equally horrible...I was on a PC at the time). Changing over to a mac opened the world of Textmate up to me, and I’ve had no reason to really look for something better since then.

Thanks to Josh Crews for
cluing me in on how to set up staging on Heroku last February

First, add heroku to the development group in the Gemfile and bundle install.

If this is a client site, you will want the client to own the
application, so we'll sign in as the client from the beginning (you
can also use "heroku sharing:transfer" to move an app to another user
later):


$ heroku auth:logout (only if you are already using heroku)
$ heroku auth:login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: client.email@address.com
Password: client-password


Then create the production and staging apps:

Continue reading "Setting up a client site on Heroku"...