solnic on blog web development, ruby, javascript and other crazy things

Back From the Dead – a batch update

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote last post. I guess I suck at writing posts on a regular basis. Hopefully I will be able to change that So…a lot has happened recently and I’ve been quite busy. First of all about 3 months ago I bought my very own apartment. The whole process of getting a bank credit took 2 months and it was sucking my energy without any mercy. But…I did it and I’m alive No more renting, I’ve got my own home. Me and the bank of course, haha.

Anyway now it’s time to get back to the Web and let people know what I’ve been working on.

Utype

At Lunar Logic Polska we’ve migrated our site to Utype which aims to be a modern, flexible, user and developer friendly CMS. It’s currently based on Merb and DataMapper. Our plan is to migrate it to Rails3 later this year. If you are interested in the development please have a look at the official GitHub repository

RubyTime

Again, at Lunar Logic Polska we’ve spent last couple of months working on a new version of our time tracking system. Version 3.1 will include some new features and many bug fixes. We should release it in July. You can see the progress at LightHouse site. The release will support external clients too – an iPhone app (by Kuba Suder) and a KDE4 plasmoid (by Marcin Kulik). RubyTime is an open source project, sources can be found at the official GitHub repository

DataMapper related goodies

That’s a fresh meat for me. I’ve resurrected a plugin that I’ve originally created to use with Utype and now after some hacking dm-is-configurable is compatible with DataMapper 0.10.0 RC1 and will be officially released whenever DataMapper 0.10 is finished, which should happen soon.

During my recent work for Ideeli I had to deal with Google Data API which I’ve found relatively simple to use via Ruby GData lib; however I would love to have even better way to access that API, hence I’ve created dm-gdata-adapters. The only thing that works there is loging in, but stay tuned! I’m going to write a wrapper around Spreadsheet API for a good start and hopefully I will find some people to help me with the rest of the APIs. If you are interested just drop me a line.

KDE4 related goodies

I’ve been experimenting with Plasma and trying to write a simple plasmoid (in Ruby or Python) which would replace Skype notifications. Current status is…double fail. I’m using an SVN snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4.3 and I’m having various issues with Ruby and Python bindings. pykde4 doesn’t work well with the Skype4Py library so I’m trying to use Ruby which seems to be unstable at the moment…oh well. We will see how it goes when KDE 4.3 RC1 is released (which will happen in a week ).

Me at Lunar Logic Polska

A couple of weeks ago I became responsible for implementing high standards of development at our company. We’ve created a list of various best practices that we’re following and now I’m one of the persons that make sure we’re really doing it. The process includes things like organizing regular code reviews, keeping track on the test coverage status for each of the projects that we’re working on, sharing knowledge between the teams etc…We will write a blog post on our site soon which will describe everything in detail as we believe it might be useful for other companies.

OK. Batch mode turned off. I’m glad I finally have the time (and energy) to write something here! G’nite