Blog
We are heading into winter again already - where has the time gone? We are all too often so busy with the day to day that we don’t find time to touch base with friends and colleagues of projects past (and hopefully projects future). So...
Developing for the iPhone can be quite fun. You get very mature frameworks to work with that do an extensive use of design patterns and you also get a fancy an highly tuned platform to play with. But there’s something I’m missing from...
AKA: Shameless Plug II. At Unboxed Consulting we have now been developing iPhone applications for 2 years. There is another post by Borja telling you the story about one of them. That was about an Enterprise application for a client. But we ...
When it comes to marketing your company, sometimes the same old-school avenues and techniques to achieve commercial success seem a bit tired and gauche within an increasingly savvy (and dare I say cynical) industry. So why not take a small risk an...
At Unboxed we also build iPhone applications. Our largest project so far has been inTouch, an application for a medical products sales company based in the US…This is the story of two men that crossed the pond with a mission; Attend the Cus...
As a programmer working with other programmers, I’m usually contributing to an already existing code base and basically just adding new functions or extending their functionality. Because I’m a person who could be influenced by others&...
Stuck in a project where every iteration fails to deliver? Where every retrospective is a nightmare? Where every show and tell is a verbal cat o’ nine tails session? Where you’re a gibbering wreck yearning for a stronger prescription? ...
It dawned on me this week that sometimes seeking out new business can be a bit like asking out a girl out on a hot date! Cold sweats, nervous shivers, butterflies in the stomach; a total nightmare… right?! This week I went along to the fre...
I was driving the family back from Lucca in Tuscany to catch our flight from Genova when a thought struck me. Car manufacturers segment their markets looking for large niches. Large enough to attract enough customers worldwide but unique eno...
Yes that’s right, despite the fact that I’m employed by Unboxed I’m not working anymore. I’m going to work every day, programming some stuff but it’s not work for me anymore. Really. I have had this feeling since I s...
The default IRB completion code that ships with Ruby does not work well when being invoked from the debugger prompt: >: ruby /test_script.rb [-2, 7] in /test_script.rb 1 require 'ruby-debug' 2 debugger => 3 :foo /test_script.rb:3 :foo (...
As a ruby developer I’m used to using testing frameworks like Rspec or Cucumber. I started polishing an old project of mine recently, which is written in Ruby/js and using Sinatra. When I looked at the code I noticed that there is a lot of J...
This week I’ve been musing over the most expensive, and delayed record in music history, the (sort of) Guns n’ Roses album Chinese Democracy. ‘Sort of’ because it’s not really Gn’R at all, it’s the band&r...
I recently started a Rails 3 application to see how things are done in the new version, and also to take an opportunity to try Mongoid. After all, Rails now plays nicely with any library that implements ActiveModel. The application i...
We have had a code review carried out on one of the projects we are currently working on, channel5.com, by an external party. Xavier Noria has looked at the code and has given us a glowing report which Channel 5 are very happy with.&nbs...
I’ve just released a new gem called Tabnav. It’s a Rails helper for generating navbars. It allows you to specify highlighting rules for each nav item in a clean way without lots of conditionals in your views. It is loosely based on th...
I assume that everybody has now heard about the wikileaks war logs leak. I thought this was a nice opportunity to hack together a Rails app that contains the data that was leaked. Hopefully this will be a good resource for people to play around bo...
The recently released update to Safari (version 5.0.1) seems to fix the security issue described below. Jeremiah Grossman points out a serious security issue that he recently found in Safari. You probably know about Safari’s autocompletion...
As a new employee of Unboxed, and being new to scrum, I thought I would tell you about my 3 month experience as a ScrumMaster thus far. Thanks to Unboxed, I have been thrown into the deep end of the world of agile, London culture, fine whiskey, an...
Search for office space from the Waterfront to Muizenberg and settle on a great and gorgeously located building in Constantia close to some superb vineyards, the names of which are a challenge (for some) to pronounce. Uitsig anyone? Tear do...
Ever wish you could write Cucumber stories for iPhone applications the way you do for web apps? Well now you can, thanks to Unboxed’s iCuke. iCuke allows you to write integration tests for your iPhone applications without changing your exis...
I’m a developer, I like structure, I like clean code, I like DRY code. I find writing CSS incredibly painful. CSS1 was first published in December 1996, so I ask, why in 2010 does it feel like CSS is just as painful as it was 14 years ago? ...
We’ve turned 5! The last five years have really flown by but I couldn’t let our fifth birthday go past without a bit of reflection!! We are in a really fantastic place as a company and I’ve got a lot of pride when I look b...
I was recently contacted for advice on how to justify utilising pair programming on a project, as the client was very nervous about the benefits and was seeking some reassurances. It raised all sorts of questions, which I checked against my previo...
Our very own Richard Stobart has added to the Agile v Waterfall debate, captured in Information Age. Richard was an expert witness in the recent BSkyB and EDS battle. You can read the whole article here: http://ow.ly/1pqkR We’d love to know ...
Rails performance tuning is often a matter of SQL tuning but we recently stumbled upon code involving a named scope that caused more SQL to run than expected. We were looking at an SQL trace in New Relic RPM for one of our apps when Nige and myse...
Lying awake in bed last night I was thinking why IT organisations find it difficult to implement Agile techniques. My initial thoughts were that the business owners are always pushing back on it and not seeing the benefits. Why are IT organisation...
At Unboxed we are continuously checking the latest tools which enhance Rails application development. Being a front-end specialist I am always keen on different approaches which make front-end development easier and more enjoyable. In recent year...
I have to confess I have played team sports all my life, especially football with a somewhat unlikely claim to fame of having played the game in Papua New Guinea and watched by the country’s Prime Minister! I have some experience of playing ...
I don’t know about you, but I struggle to understand the nuances of the varying flavours of Agile that fly around and, at times, the purist adherence to one particular dogma, be that Scrum, Agile, XP, Lean, etc. To me it is all about taking ...