Mike Swieton on Atomic Spin

Don’t Base Your UI on Your Database Design

Why you shouldn't create simple CRUD forms when your database has one table for users, one for groups, and one for companies.

Developer Tools

Distributing Large Files Easily with Amazon S3

How I use Amazon's S3 to archive data and distribute large files to customers.

DevOps & System Admin.

Building a Virtual Appliance – Repeatably

In order to easily distribute a complicated piece of software, we created a virtual machine appliance. We developed an automated and modular build process.

DevOps & System Admin.

Easier Capistrano Deploys from GitHub with ssh-agent

Far, far too often I forget to start the ssh-agent before I use Capistrano to deploy. Here's a quick little snippet to help you avoid that mistake.

Ruby on Rails

Testing Email Templates in Rails

Email clients all seem to display HTML mails differently. Here are a few tools I've used to make implementing Rails email templates a bit less painful.

Web Apps

Building and Deploying Custom Binaries on Heroku

Heroku is a great platform – if it has what you need. Here's one workable approach to installing custom binaries on Heroku.

Ruby on Rails

ActiveRecord Black Magic

ActiveRecord's query interface is very powerful, but sometimes it will not generate the SQL you expect. Here's one approach to overriding this.

UX/Design Tools

Getting Around Internet Explorer’s 4,096 CSS Rule Limit

I recently found out that IE can't handle more than 4,095 selectors in a single CSS file. Here's my work-around.

Ruby on Rails

Making Rails and TeamCity Play Well Together

After much experimentation, I’m actually happy with how my Rails project is being tested with TeamCity.

Web Apps

GET and POST Parameter Parsing in Rails

Rails does a lot of magic to parse the data browsers submit into a meaningful, complex Ruby object. Here's how it does it.

Project & Team Management

Prune Your Backlog

A backlog is often created once and then looked at one iteration at a time. Maintaining it will help you get the best information about your project.

iOS / OS X

Mobile Safari on iOS 5.1 Unexpectedly Making Cross Origin Resource Sharing Requests

My Ajax calls were failing and I saw my application logs containing many requests with the HTTP verb "OPTIONS". I narrowed it to oddities with PDFs on Safari.

Mike Swieton

Keep up with our latest posts.