So years ago, in the early days of my HN acct, I bought a book called "Founders at work" that happened to be authored by PG's wife Jessica Livingstone. Great book with a bunch of interviews with various founder/hero types - Woz, Evan Williams, etc.

One of the interviews with with DHH - the Rails guy. I remember him talking about how he used to write PHP and it was just too hard, and that's how he found ruby and started building stuff with it.

So, I've been going through these Laravel...

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

And here we are, but first - a story...

Yesterday was my 4 year old's 5th birthday. Michelle and I go back and forth about who's going to take video and who's going to take stills for singing "Happy Birthday", and decide I'll take the video.

We get up to the part where she's lighting the candle and my phone stops recording - "Your phone is full, please manage storage under blah blah blah...". This is an iPhone 6+, bought it two months ago. Obviously I bought...

This is currently in regards to the Atom editor that I dutifully filled out an "invite" request for. It could be about anything, though. I get this same feeling every time.

It takes me right back to high school gym class and waiting to get picked for a team. And waiting. And waiting. And God this is embarrassing, will somebody please fucking pick me already?

This is a piece of software that you install on your computer. Not a Saas thing that'll buckle under the weight of too many...

v0 - Blogger.

I think I got 3 or 4 posts in before realizing I wanted to try actually throwing up a website of my own.

v1 - Wordpress

One click installer at GoDaddy, my webhost for the first three months.

v2 - Drupal

I wanted to get more involved in the development side of it and was really loving the opportunities in the Drupal job market. Migrating a Wordpress blog was so predictable that there was a Drupal module to do so, and it brought all of my old posts, categories,...

So long story short - I've been doing this thing a few years, I've learned a few tricks and it seems like every single new developer trick I learn about is already set up in the Mac for me.

I just learned about Apache Benchmark. If you don't know, Google it. It lets you ding your webserver with 100 or 100,000 requests to see how it responds under pressure. It's really cool and really simple.

Please don't do this (more than once).

ab -n 100 -c 5 http://www.johnnygrubb.com/

That means,...

My first post on my new blog! I wrote this one all by myself, with the help of hundreds and hundreds of open source collaborators, Stack Overflow commenters, IRC, Google Groups, and sheer force of WILL!!!

This is my first running, production Ruby on Rails app. It took me about two days/6 hours to write, and about 4 days/30 hours to deploy. Deploy means "make work on the web so people can see it" and it was every bit the pain in the ass that I'd heard it was supposed to be. But by god, here...

I was listening to RadioLab the other evening during the WNYC pledge drive. During the part of the show in which they were actually driving pledges they announced one of those perks for donors of a certain level, I think they called them "lab partners". It entitles you to some stuff, some interactivity with RadioLab producers, and the obligatory "exclusive content". The very first thing that popped in my head was -

I'm tired of content

I got to thinking. Commerce and economics. Supply...

It has been a week. I've been working lately on a site for a non-prof out in California. Their mission is the spread of invasive plant species in California. I built them a system to allow the crowdsourcing of their Spring Nursery Survey, which is where they send folks out to various botanical nurseries around the state and make sure that they aren't selling any plants that they shouldn't be selling.

It's not illegal to sell invasive plant species, most of them are quite pretty. It's...

My vet just recently joined the 21st century and moved all of their records from big, brown paper files to a computer system. Her husband is an IT guy so he did the research and picked out all the computers, networked them together and set up this software system for the office. It looked like a pretty big job to migrate all of their client records to a computer system, but hey, the avoided it long enough, right?

I don't know why I just thought of this, but about a web app that manages...

note: Parts one and two.

Phase Four - Complacence

It happens to the best of us. We sometimes take our loved ones for granted. We don't remember the thrill of exploring the new relationship, and start to get annoyed when we're forcibly reminded that those days are over. We see others walking around arm in arm with their new love and you think to ourselves "enjoy it while it lasts" or "I bet you just play games on that thing, don't you, chump?" Soon, it seems like everyone has an iPhone....

Phase Two - Love

The day that I knew I'd found the one was July 12, 2008. The 3G and the OS 2.0 software update had come out the day before. I'd updated as soon as I could, playing my part in the server issues that Apple had that day. I was fascinated by the prospect of adding apps, though I didn't really know what I would want to add to the thing that wasn't already there.

Had a nice loooong road trip down I-81 to contemplate such matters. I spent most of the ride and all of the...

Bollocks!!  Do not buy a domain from Yahoo.

I just want to make sure that shows up in the description of search results, if there are any.  Now a parable...

Many years ago it occured to me that if I didn't go and buy JohnnyGrubb.com, then I was stupid.  I had no idea how to make websites and no need for one whatsoever, but I did know enough to know that if I didn't buy my own friggin name then someday I might regret it.  So, in March 2006, I bought my own name for 5 years.  Doesn't...