Software Development

REE segfaults when Rails application has too many localisation files

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

We ran into an interesting problem – at some point of time our Rails application started to fail occaionally because of REE segfaults on startup. Even starting the console with ‘script/console production’ was occasionally failing with REE segfault. Application was growing, new features were added and segfaults started happening more and more often. There was …

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Pitfalls of Rails fragment caching with memcached

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

Fragment caching is a powerful technique for improving performance of your web application. Rails site describes in detail how to apply this technique. Rails are providing developers with really excellent abstractions, but it’s always good to know what’s under the hood and how it all works. There are a few things that might potentially cause …

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Notes from Gothenburg – Nordic Ruby 2011 conference

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

Here are my notes from Nordic Ruby conference in Göteborg, Sweden.

I’d like to say big thanks to the organisers of the conference (especially CJ @cjkihlbom) – everything went really smooth, even though there’s been 150 people attending this year compared to 90 last year.
Some points that I’d really like to highlight are:

  • a lot of time to meet people and discuss: 30 minutes talks followed by 30 minutes breaks, no q&a – those who had questions had an opportunity to talk to the speakers during the breaks
  • venue was great (of course, the boat 🙂 – there was enough space for everyone to move around, but at the same time it was compact enough not to get lost also everyone had an opportunity to have lunch and dinner together
  • “job board” a huge white board where anyone can post information about open positions in their companies – it got filled withing firts few hours – job market is really hot
  • lightning talks that any participant can give – 5 minute talks in the end of the day – it was really great
  • real coffee 🙂 espresso, latte, cappuccino, americano – you name it – professional baristas were at your service
  • 5K Nordic Ruby run organised on the second day’s morning

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Call to undefined function: imagecreatefromjpeg()

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

While installing new Joomla modules I came across this PHP error (yep, still have to deal with PHP occasionally). I had PHP compiled from source on Ubuntu 10.04 as per earlier instructions. Quick check of phpinfo() indicated that while gd module was compiled in, it didn’t have JPEG support: GD Support enabled GD Version bundled …

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Setting up your own git server on Ubuntu

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

This will create a new user ‘gitosis’ and prepare a structure for repositories in /srv/gitosis. Now let’s initialize a gitosis-admin repo – it is used for managing repositories and access

Of course there’s always an option to use github. And if you’re working on an open source project, or want to concentrate on coding and not system administration, github is a lot better option than setting up and managing your own git server (I’ve been so impressed by @defunkt‘s presentation on #frozenrails, that started recommending github to everyone 🙂 But if you already pay for a virtual machine somewhere (like Linode), then setting up your own git server might be a viable option, especially that it is sooo easy.

The following instructions have been verified on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, but should work at least on Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 just as well.

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Agile distributed team – using chat to run scrum meetings

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

The current development team that I’m working in is really small – just 2 software gurus, a product owner and me as a scum-master/system admninistrator/part-time developer/architect.

Our team is distributed to the extent that sometimes all four of us are located in different places during our meetings – but time zones difference is in most of the cases withing 1-2 hours. Up until recently some of us didn’t have a permanent office and had to participate in daily scrum meetings, and sprint planning/reviews from public open spaces. Continue readingAgile distributed team – using chat to run scrum meetings

Choosing Mobile Development Platform

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

There’s been a lot of heated discussions in the blogosphere in the past month about mobile platforms from independent developer perspective. Which platform to choose, if you want to develop cool applications, reach a lot of users and maximize your revenues?

I previously wrote on this subject a year ago, when Android was announced, and three years ago, when I was really disappointed by a pretty much dead S60 applications market.

This time it started with a great presentation by Teemu Kurppa (a mastermind behind mobile Jaiku) at MobileDevCamp Helsinki – “Platform = Stage. How to choose a mobile development platform?“. It is a must see for every mobile developer.

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Introducing Moozement

Posted on by Ivan Kuznetsov

Last year I got involved in the development of a new social network – Moozement. There are plenty of social networks out there, there are even white label social networks. So why create another one?

Jyri Engeström wrote some time ago about the case for object-centered sociality: “‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people”. I could not agree with him more. The glue of each community is something that unites them – common interest, social object. When you join new social network, you typically start by building your social graph – re-establishing links to the real people you know, checking if they have already registered, inviting those whom you would like to see in the new environment. But there must be something beyond the initial phase of building the social graph. And this is the problem that haunts giants like Facebook and MySpace. You cannot possibly have common interest with everyone, and you don’t want to share the same things with everyone.

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