http://derekperez.com/blog You've Reached My Internets. Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:19:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work; The Sound of Young America Merlin Mann is an amazing speaker, and I've always found his talks inspirational. His theories have helped me through a ton of tough spots. http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/06/youre-going-to-suck/ Unless you have ultra simplistic needs, (and are using Rails) I always recommend using the fantastic will_paginate plugin for paginating ActiveRecord, and even non-ActiveRecord collections! But, if you have a basic need to to page an array, you could open up the Array class and add this method: class Array ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/06/simple-way-to-page-an-array-in-ruby/ At Caring.com, we write our view templates using Haml and Sass (with Chris Eppstein's Compass CSS Framework). It was a little strange to get used to at first, especially coming from tag-based/ERB-style frontend templating, but I have found that it is surprisingly straightforward, and succinct. TextMate, which is a fabulous ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/06/haml-sass-bundles-for-textmate/ http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/06/john-hodgmans-speech-at-the-whitehouse-correspondents-dinner/ I've been working with Mr. Scott Robbins on his fantastic jQuery PageSlide plugin for the last few weeks. It has been a lot of fun, we've moved the project off of google code completely, and today have released version 1.1 of PageSlide on Github. version 1.1 is essentially a complete ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/06/pageslide-plugin-for-jquery/ It has been a busy month. In less than thirty days, my life has completely changed, for the better. I've moved back to the south bay, from the east bay and am now currently living centrally in Menlo Park, right next to the train station. I had about a week ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/03/what-am-i-doing-with-myself/ http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/03/everything-is-amazing-nobody-is-happy/ Thanks for reading, readers. I'll be posting more insightful things later. http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/02/a-late-valentine-for-all-my-readers/ Thanks so much everyone for submitting your Fibonacci examples! One of the reasons why I asked everyone to do this is because it gives me (and all of us) a chance to learn about different approaches and different languages. So, in case you haven't figured it out, it was sort ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/02/fibonacci/ Lately, I've been studying algorithms, just for fun, because I am hardcore like that. Also, I've been very excited to test the speed/performance of the newly released and stable Ruby 1.9.1. I have been waiting patiently for the release, it is full of great new things like a modern VM, ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/02/nerd-challenge-fibonacci-fun/ I have a lot of respect for Merlin Mann. The Merlin Mann I knew 6 months ago vs. the Merlin Mann of today seems very different. Almost as if I've watched him shed an exoskeleton of "tips to be creative", to really seeking what it means to be a creative ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/01/design-patterns-for-creativity/ http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/01/i-didnt-come-here-to-make-friends/ Anyone else out there tired of Twitter-spam? Every new web 2.0+ application that hits the web today asks you for your twitter credentials so they can post a 140 character spam about some various task you are performing at some website I don't care about. However, there are times when ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2009/01/why-twitter-makes-friendfeed-obsolete/ The iPhone is hot. Its a badass micro-computer-internet-having-app-installing-jizz-casting-awesome-machine that can also make phone calls, but I have to bitch about one major flaw in the entire thing, and that flaw is Mobile Safari. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the mobile browser, it is leaps and ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/12/why-does-apple-stifle-mobile-safaris-true-potential/ I am absolutely excited about this news!! Yesterday, both the Merb and Rails camp have announced the news, so I won't bother reiterating whats already been said. I'd rather talk about some of the major points that really get me excited about this announcement and how it is going to ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/12/merb-and-rails-come-together-for-rails-3/ Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking, thinking about how technology and the internet have been applied in such fascinating and unbelievable ways, ways that have absolutely re-written the fabric of how we as citizens of earth interact with information, but also each other. When I think about all ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/12/changing-the-world-in-trivial-ways/ Linkedin just minutes ago announced they've thrown their hat in the "social application platform" ring! This is exciting news for people who are poised to bring innovative and interesting applications to the business and professional network. Read more about the press release here at TechCrunch. As of today, there is no ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/10/linkedin-announces-business-application-platform/ Listen to Dan Aykroyd discuss the importance of death and skulls in our world, and explain to you why he decided to embark on creating the "purest" vodka known to man. To be honest, this is actually a really really good vodka. I am no expert, but it tastes really ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/10/crystal-head-vodka/ I have been rolling around the idea of starting up more freelancing to try to bolster my savings for the coming years, so I've decided to take on more consulting work. For an indepth look at my work experience and skills, please visit my linkedin profile, here are some highlights. - ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/10/hire-me/ Today I was faced with an interesting dilemma, how does one programmatically define migrations into a plugin so you can essentially "plug-n-play". I did a little bit of research into Rails Engines, and I wasn't too terribly excited about the notion of having a dependency for such a small plugin, ... http://derekperez.com/blog/2008/09/programmatic-migrations-for-rails-plugins/