Introduction to Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx: 10 Minute Talk at Austin on Rails

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

I did a quick talk at Austin on Rails last night about my experience using Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx for doing full-text search on CheapTweet. We did a series of short talks last night so this is only a 10 minute overview. Hope some of you will find it helpful. Quick ...

Austin on Rails Talk: Building TweetReach with Sinatra, Tokyo Cabinet and Grackle

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

I gave a talk last night (3/24/2009) at Austin on Rails about building a new (yet-to-be-released) application called TweetReach using tools that are somewhat off the beaten path. These included Sinatra, Tokyo Cabinet and my new Twitter API library: Grackle (which I'll talk about in more detail in a future ...

A recent Rubyist goes to the Lone Star Ruby Conference

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

I attended the Lone Star Ruby Conference (LSRC), held here in Austin over the past two days. As this was my first conference on the topic, I thought I would share some observations. First, a vigorous caveat emptor... I'm a former Java guy still relatively new to the Ruby world. ...

Surprisingly basic Rails performance tips – and the people that don’t love them

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Antonio Cangiano offers up 10 Ruby on Rails Performance tips, some of which are really just good practice in any web application and aren't specific to Rails. This includes gems like: don’t be afraid of using the cool features provided by your database, even if they are not directly supported by ...