Non-Profit Tech Blog

NOTE: This post was originally written right before I left on vacation on New Year’s Day. I wasn’t feeling too comfortable about being rushed so I let this post age a bit before I released. And I decided to take the piece that was talking about the early ramifications about GiveWell and moved it to the next post.. This post is primarily for developers and technical architects. My apologies…

Rabbit holes I’ve fallen into in the last several weeks… And those among you who are developers will know what I’m speaking of. The rest of you may catch a few buzzwords here and there

Building a crowdsourcing app for socialmarkets.org and doing it in a pretty heavily Ajaxified interface — Rails backend serving JSON — it’s schweet!

Learning how to integrate Ruby on Rails with Yahoo! User Interface 2.4.1 (which rocks and will be featured soon). Still need to delve into RJS templates though and these really cool Ruby plugins to build dynamic CSS…

Designing and devloping an entirely different crowdsourcing app that is going to be a great complement for socialmarkets.org which meant diving into little bunny holes of its own like:

• Messing around with a Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon server over at slicehost.com
• Having the sad experience of spending almost half an hour trying to do private and public keys on a Windows machine for export to said Linux server for SSH terminal sessions on PuTTY only to find out it works from Linux to Windows if you want to get it done in your lifetime
• Installing all the necessary elements of said server for the Web app like iptables, and learning all the vagaries of Rails 2.0.2 and Rubygems 1.0.1 and how they don’t really work well together
• Finding the best way to learn about basic Linux server admin for web apps
• And then of course, relearning what I knew about Rails scaffolds from earlier versions of Rails because a few of the conventions have changed (some inexplicably so). Those of you just learning about Rails right now and mostly relying on blogs to learn about it are going to have to wait while the Rails community catches up with these changes. A lot of old documentation is broken now.
• And learning about restful_authentication which is really, really, quite cool once you learn how to make it work for Rails 2.0.2

All that while I was also learning how to use Aptana Studio with the RadRails plugin (which isn’t bad but never gave me the warm and fuzzies like Visual Studio used to do.)

And in my off-time, seriously nerding out with Amazon Unbox and downloading the entire 3rd season of Battlestar Galactica — I think I have reached my 2008 quota for nerdy goodness hehe…