Continuously Deployed Dan Mayer's Dev Blog

Since Caliper is shutting down on April 30th, I made a little video to show what it did, and explain it's purpose. It isn't really promotional, but if people ever want a reference of something I worked on this should help.

Caliper Screencast from dan mayer on Vimeo.

It will becoming my development blog. I am currently working on updating and reconfiguring the system, but you can look forward to many changes around here.

If you want to follow and read my more personal blog posts, head over to WastedBrains, which will host my non development blogging and thoughts.

The Ruby Resume project, is a project I started to make it easier for Ruby developers to create, host, share their resume, and keep it up to date. It is an open source project, that anyone can use to help manage their resume online. It offers a variety of options and you can take or leave any part you wish. Basically, you fork the project, alter some things for your needs, and can contribute interesting additions back to the shared Ruby Resume project.

The project uses Sinatra, Markdown, and a collection of Rake tasks to get the job done.

What does the Ruby Resume project do?

• Supports deploying your resume to Heroku in a variety of formats.


• Easily deploy your app to any Sinatra compatible host


• Allows simple publishing of your resume to your github personal page.


• It makes it simple to publish your resume as a gem. I got the idea for a personal resume gem from Eric Davis.


• It uses Markdown, which integrates well with Github Jobs


• It currently suppots HTML, LaTeX, and Markdown. Soon it will support PDF, RTF, etc...

I built this because I had to publish and start updating my resume again after not dealing with it for 3 years. I wanted something that would simplify the whole process. I wanted my resume under git, and I wanted to be able to quickly deploy any changes online and support a large number of formats.

Anyways check out the source on Github and the Readme which gives simple instructions on how to use the project. Or what the video below which demonstrates how to use this project for your own resume.

Live Examples:

• My resume on Heroku


• My Github personal page


• My personal resume gem is, danmayer-resume, which can be installed using gem install danmayer-resume, then execute danmayer-resume

Ruby Resume Project from dan mayer on Vimeo.

I have been using Emacs as my default editor for awhile now. My emacs setup was a hodge podge of various plugins, code from friends, blogs, etc... It wasn't organized and was hard to maintain and fine tune. I decided it was time to get my emacs config under control, and under git so it was portable and easy to revert update etc.

I looked at a couple options for existing Emacs configuration setups for Ruby.

Emacs Starter Kit
Topfunky's Emacs Starter Kit
Aquamacs Starter Kit

In the end I ended up going with Aquamacs Starter Kit, namely because I have been a fan of Aquamacs for awhile, and already new my way around it's system pretty well. The original Starter kit, from Technomancy, doesn't play nicely with Aquamacs and leads to some issues. Some people have forks that are supposed to work better with Aquamacs, but it seems the kit built from the ground up for Aquamacs works best. Topfunky's project is based on the original emacs starter kit, but has been customized to work well with Carbon Emacs, which is more cross compatible than Aquamacs, so your emacs config is more likely to be portable to all unix systems as well as OS X with Carbon emacs. This looks like a really interesting option, but I decided I liked some of the nice extra sugar that Aquamacs provides.

First install Aquamacs starter kit

There were a few things that I couldn't stand from the defaults in the Aquamacs Starter Kit and removed also some modifications that I added.

Disabling/Removing some Starter Kit features

You likely installed your starter kit to a location like, '/Users/danmayer/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/aquamacs-emacs-starter-kit', go there to find the files for modification.

Disabling the emacs Twitter client, sorry I like my twitter to be entirely separate from my dev environment.
Then edit 'init.el':

;;(autoload 'twitter-get-friends-timeline "twitter" nil t)
;;(autoload 'twitter-status-edit "twitter" nil t)
;;(global-set-key "\C-xt" 'twitter-get-friends-timeline)
;;(add-hook 'twitter-status-edit-mode-hook 'longlines-mode)


Disable Ruby-electric, which tries to complete various matched chars and statements as you type like ', {}. (), begin/end, if/end, etc... It drives me nuts and breaks my thought process. Edit 'misc-mode-tweaks.el':

;;(require 'ruby-electric)
;;(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook
;; (lambda nil
;; (require 'ruby-electric)
;; (ruby-electric-mode)
;; (flymake-mode-on)))


Additions to Starter Kit


;; ruby-complexity flog scores for methods http://github.com/topfunky/emacs-starter-kit/tree/master/vendor/ruby-complexity/
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/vendor/ruby-complexity/")

(require 'linum)
(require 'ruby-complexity)
(add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook
(function (lambda ()
(flymake-mode)
(linum-mode)
(ruby-complexity-mode))))


I also liked some of the options from defunkt's Textmate minor mode. First 'cd ~/.emacs.d/vendor; git clone git://github.com/defunkt/textmate.el.git' Again added to my .emacs file:


;; textmate bindings for some nicer key combos for common actions
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/vendor/textmate.el")
(require 'textmate)
(textmate-mode)


I am just starting to get going with improving my Emacs setup, so I am sure I will likely be making additional changes. The current changes above are checked into my fork of the project, feel free to pull the above changes if you'd like. If you have any great Emacs tips, tricks, or plugins I should add let me know as I am sure it can just keep getting better, but I am pretty happy for now.

Continuing my work on converting this blog to be a dev blog, I moved over all non development and computer related posts to my personal blog. I just converted about 1,000 posts and 3,000 comments from MovableType to Tumblr and Disqus.

I decided I would host my personal blog on Tumblr, which has been interesting so far. Sucking the old posts and comments out of MovableType and pushing them to Tumblr wasn't as easy as I had hoped. Although it gave me a chance to enjoy on of my favorite parts of being a developer. If something doesn't exist and I want it, I can built it. So I set off to write a script that would take a Movable Type blog export and import all of the posts into Tumblr and push all of the comments to Disqus. While it wasn't the easiest thing to do, it wasn't that difficult either. I have slowly built up a collection of various utilities to help port from Movable Type to Wordpress, or from wordpress.org to wordpress.com. Things that help clean up formatting or remove javascript and replace it with something allowed on wordpress.org. I added my conversion script to the inconveniently named MT_WP_Converter git repo.

View MovableType to Tumblr Converter Script

Quick Gotchas:
* There are lots of older or bad example code on how to use the disqus API out there, I had a problem posting comments because all of the POST endpoints must end with a '/', which I didn't know. This forum post helped me fix an issue posting to disqus with rest client.
* Remember to turn off the facebook publishing for tumblr, before doing the import or testing it. I didn't remember this and published the same test post on facebook about 40 times. Oops!

Fitbit has been slow to release an official API, so I started work on a screen scraping version. It will become a nice gem interface to the real API when it is released. It is pretty limited at the moment, only able to pull the most basic current days info.

You can check it out here ruby-fitbit on github.

Example output

~/projects/ruby-fitbit(master) > ruby bin/ruby-fitbit my@email.com MYPASS

Calories Burned 834

Steps Taken 552

Milkes Walked .23

Activity Levels Durations:

Sedentary 11hrs 28min

Lightly 19min

Fairly 16min

Very 0min


done

I also connected a quick sinatra app on Heroku to it so that I could embed the data in my personal blog as a widget. I will clean that up and release the code for it soon. Here is the widget at the moment. I need to add good CSS that is customizable by the user. It would also be good to make it easy for others to host their own widgets opposed to just my own data.