Jerod Santo

1) Packages.

Technical folks like ourselves often have to describe keyboard combinations to other (sometimes not so) technical folks.

Many developers have become smitten with Twitter’s Bootstrap, but I’m personally more excited by what the Zurb team has drummed up for Foundation 3.

Let’s not argue about tabs vs. spaces.

If you’re not disgusted by the thought of piping things in to or out of a cat… You might be a Unix Geek.

If you’re a Ruby developer — and you haven’t been too busy starring in Geico commercials — you are familiar with Bundler.

We’ve all been there.

Over the years, I’ve found a few tools so invaluable for managing *nix servers that I end up installing them on every machine under my employ.

Dear web designers, First, I want you to know that I admire your work.

There was a brief period in high school when I was BIG in to the WWF.

I’m not leery of Google shuttering its Gmail service, but I can imagine a scenario where they cut off my access to Gmail and I have no way to plead my case to the search behemoth.

On episode 54 of the Ruby Rogues podcast, Josh Susser mentioned an interview question he used to use where he would ask interviewees to reimplement Enumerable’s *ect methods (collect, select, reject, and detect) using inject.

Tee is one of those commands so simple, so basic that you’ve either been using it for years (and turn your nose up at me for writing about something so obvious) or you’ll wish you had been (and sing my praises for writing about something so useful).

I recently took part in the first (annual, I hope) Hack Omaha competition.

Your Rails app needs custom configuration so you run off to GitHub to find a gem for that.

FireHOL is the best tool I’ve used for configuring Linux firewalls.

We all know that naming things is one of the hard things in Computer Science.

Once in a blue moon I have a valid reason to visit Best Buy.

If you follow me on Twitter, then you know that I was a little upset last week with regard to one of my little side projects, ip2loc, which provides simple IP address to geographic location translation via a Google Map.

Rails 3.1’s asset pipeline compiles all of our JavaScript into a single file which is executed on all pages which include the javascript_include_tag method.

Sublime Text 2 may be the best text editor on the planet, but its icon (as of build 2165) is an abomination.

‘Tis the season for retrospectives and “Best of” lists.

iOS 5’s Photo Stream feature — in which your photos are synced across devices via iCloud — is pretty cool, but like most new software it has its limitations.

Amazon’s new Kindle Cloud Reader is a really cool web app and yet another step toward the web playing a huge role in mobile like it does on the desktop.

OS X users who prefer command-line Vim over MacVim (I’m sure we’re few and far between) may become frustrated with the lack of features enabled in Apple’s stock /usr/bin/vim.

Last week I shared my Dotjs hack which forces Chrome’s Omnibar searches to use Google’s “past year” parameter.

UPDATE: I’ve since moved to a better way of doing this.

I thought I’d share an interesting term I picked up last week from John Ashenden of Grooveshark: The Coldplay Effect As an Internet radio listener, your like/dislike history and recently played music are used to determine which songs to play next (it’s ob…

Many Rails apps need to accommodate multiple tenants.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Heroku, it’s that grabbing a snapshot of your production database is incredibly handy for troubleshooting. heroku db:pull is so rad that I wanted to have it on other projects not hosted on their platform, so I wrote a

Heroku’s new Cedar stack is awesome for many reasons, one of which is first-class Node.js hosting.

Many development teams use 37Signals’ Campfire for group chat.

bench•mar•ket•ing |‘bench,märkiti NG| noun (pejorative) The misleading use of unrepresentative benchmark software results in marketing a computer system.

You’ve probably heard of Pow.

Here’s a quick bit of info that will hopefully save somebody some time.

Want to upgrade to the newly released Firefox 4 while maintaining your Firefox 3 install for browser testing purposes?

Code isn’t the only thing we should endeavor to keep DRY.

If, like me, you prefer staying light on your feet, you probably use a powerful text editor coupled with multiple shell sessions to drive your Rails development.

jQuery has a utility function called jQuery.inArray which confounds many people when they first stumble across it in the API docs.

I’ve been listening to tech-related podcasts since the birth of the medium.

Heroku’s free offering includes a 5MB shared database.

Context switching: computers are great at it, humans suck at it.

Cocoa’s WebViews provide a scripting object through which you can execute JavaScript from Objective-C and Objective-C from JavaScript.

I recently enjoyed the opportunity to help Grooveshark reinvent their web interface.

I have a Rails application that allows people to email in attachments that become documents in the system.

Let’s face it, we all spend way too much time trying out different todo systems and not enough time actually DOING the tasks we type, jot, or bleed into them.

Professionally I’ve been writing a ton of JavaScript lately, but in my free time I took a detour into the land of Cocoa to develop a tiny little Mac app.

I competed in the first ever Node Knockout over the weekend with a couple of friends and the fruit of our labor is an 8-bit multiplayer shooter called LazerCatz!

I asked this on Twitter the other day, but alas nobody came back with an answer.

Instapaper Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet will change (for the better) how you consume content online.