Posts by Brian Ryckbost

Installing flash plugin on Travis CI is simple and quick. Here’s how.

Custom profile settings for Chrome used with Capybara 1.1 stable seem to be getting ignored. Here’s my quick workaround.

Firefox doesn’t allow references to web fonts hosted on another domain. A quick workaround is to Base64 encode your truetype fonts for optimal rendering.

When working alone and tasked to solve a problem or implement a feature, I seem to follow a similar pattern of clarity, leading to confusion and frustration, and back to clarity.

Keyboard shortcuts are a wonderful way to introduce efficiencies into an application. Here’s a quick rundown of how I integrated Keymaster into a recent Spine project.

Delayed Job 3.0 was released over the holidays. Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what’s changed.

Get Ruby 1.9.3-p0 installed with libyaml on CentOS to avoid warnings.

A quick introduction to Class.allocate, a class method you can use to allocate space for a new object and skip initialization of that object.

In which I use a phrase from a Sailor as the basis for this blog post on over-programming.

Need to define a capybara step for double clicking an element? Here’s what we came up with.

A quick introduction to a weekend project: seinfeld.sh. Inspired by my terminal outputting the last login date, seinfeld.sh shows the date of your last open source contribution as tracked by Calendar About Nothing.

A look into leadership and how it ties in to the open source community. It’s more than superiority; it is social influence and deeply impacts how we communicate and work on projects.

Try out capybara-webkit for faster javascript scenarios.

It’s no secret that we love user stories. We’re behavior driven and focus our daily tasks around user actionable stories. But near the launch of a project, or the end of a milestone, things can get hairy. Unmaintainable even. And workflow from the team can suffer, especially if there’s anyone working remotely.

Schedule a tweet for the future using Delayed Job and the Twitter gem. Plus, some goodies on how to test it with Cucumber!

SimpleGeo was added as a geocoder to Graticule in early January. Here’s a quick example on how to make use of the service.

The Michigan Lean Startup Conference is an event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup taking place Thursday, May 19, 2011 8:00 AM — 5:00 PM

Integrating Spreedly into an application is straightforward. Testing it with Cucumber, however, was a little less so. Here’s how we did it.

Skip the theory. Start doing something. Be the case study.

Evaluate and validate your idea or side-project before you start coding.

Specify a branch for a git repository in your gemfile.

Turning microformats formatted as JSON into .vcf and .ics files for a Chrome extension.

A simple Ruby script to post your top 5 weekly artists from Last.fm to a Campfire room.

Theodore Levitt, Economist and Professor at Harvard Business School, once told his M.B.A. students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”