Today I noticed that I don’t have Skype installed, so naturally, I went to Skype.com. Then I was presented with their homepage: [] The problem? No "Download" action button above the fold, or below the fold for that matter. That is, quite frankly, shocking. So I hovered on the "Get Skype" drop down menu and clicked on the one for Mac. On the new page I was presented with, I clicked on the "Download Skype" button. And then … [] Oh snap! You’d have to either create an account or sign in before ...

Update: I have blogged about the things I have learnt from this. Last night, after some long overdue frustration, I have open sourced Angel Nest - an online platform for connecting entrepreneurs and investors, similar to AngelList. Shortly after I open sourced my work, the news got picked up by Hacker News and went onto its front page. (Update: I was just informed that the story was picked up by Reddit as well.) The Github repository has since been followed by 250+ people and forked by 60+ time...

On a cold windy day, we are comfortably sitting in our chairs beside the fireplace, holding a mug full of hot tasty latte. We are slowly and calmly sipping on our coffee, imagining that things could be far worse outside of our safe and warm house. Exactly how do we know that things could be far worse? We don’t, because we are too comfortable and too familiar with what we currently have. Being happy with where you are is one thing, being ignorant is another. Inventions and innovations aren’t bo...

[] Comic: Because ActiveRecord is Slow!

Today is my last day at Envato. I have been working here for a year and half and it has been, without a doubt the most fulfilling experience I have ever had in my professional career. I was hired as a PHP developer initially. Who knew, several months into the job I was ‘converted’ voluntarily to a full time Ruby developer - and it has been the highlight of my career progression. It is hard to imagine what I would have become if it wasn’t for Envato’s support behind my conversion. During my time...

[] My entry to the RubyCommitters design contest. View it in action at http://heroesofruby.heroku.com/ :-)

[] Sneak peak of the redesign of slim-lang.com. :)

So, you are using Slim, right? If not, go check it out because it’s awesome. ;) Now, I don’t know about you but prior to Slim I use Haml quite a bit, and even though syntax-wise Haml and Slim have a lot in common, it’s still quite a challenge to convert all Haml templates to Slim templates. As a result, let me present you with a quick n’ dirty Haml2Slim converter! Check out the source code.

At Envato we have a few dozen sites residing on multiple servers. The data on a portion of the servers need to be regularly backed up to Amazon S3. The Envato Mad Scientist Ryan Allen has worked on a script called Sir Sync-A-Lot which syncs the data to S3. This was done after evaluating a bunch of scripts including s3sync. Today I turned Ryan’s original script into a little Rubygem and added a bit more features. Go check out the source code!

For the past few weeks I have started contributing to a small project - Slim. Slim is a fast, lightweight templating engine for Rails 3. It has been tested on Ruby 1.9.2 and Ruby/REE 1.8.7. Slim is heavily influenced by Haml and Jade. Andrew Stone who is the author of the project has posted a quick update on the latest feature additions to Slim. Please go check it out. The source code of Slim is available on Github.