Posts by Chris Rittersdorf

We recently finished up a project that uses AWS Lambda. The project needed to crunch large sets of numbers in a small amount of time. Lambda turned out to be a good fit for doing exactly that. But, it involved some trial and error. Here are a few lessons we learned along the way.

Welcome back for the third post of our blog series on how we build mobile apps at Collective Idea. In the last installment we covered basic project setup. This time, we’ll discuss our first steps in fleshing out the application.

Collective Idea’s been bit by the Elixir bug recently. And in my research to configure its Alchemist tools, I’ve discovered an interesting text editor: Spacemacs. Spacemacs is an easy-to-install set of defaults for Emacs. And I love it! But, I’m a diehard Vim fanatic. How could I say something that sacrilegious!?

A week ago I finished building an Ergodox keyboard as a way of easing RSI problems and having fun. However, in adjusting to this
new keyboard layout, I learned some valuable lessons about my personal development style instead.

What seemed like a simple-reskinning turned into a much more involved project. It’s codebase that’s sat dormant for a few years, and that posed difficulty finishing tasks in the time we originally thought it would.

The following covers a few of the lessons we learned. That way you can be aware of pitfalls the next time you have to update a legacy iOS application.

Apple’s introduction of Swift to the Cocoa development toolbox has created a buzz amongst Cocoaheads. The language is flexible and lends itself to new patterns which traditionally Objective-C programmers are excited about. I got excited about a pattern that emerged while working on a new version of the Dead Man’s Snitch iOS app:* using Swift structs to store application configuration information*.

!If you’re like me, you’ve let ActiveRecord hold your hand for way too long. And when it comes time to write advanced PostgreSQL queries, you need to experiment in the REPL to find what you’re looking for. Add this trick to your toolbox to make working with the PostgreSQL REPL simpler.