codevader

Not sure why this isn’t part of MacOS by default, but you can install wget by following the instructions here.

Running Codevader for the last year has been really exciting and we’ve worked on some great projects with some awesome clients. One of those clients was a startup that has now hired the entire Codevader team, including myself.

So Codevader will not be taking on any more work. If you find your way to the Codevader website because you’re looking for a team to build you something, contact me anyway, since I know many other developers who are always looking for work.

What happens to CustomerFu? We’re licensing CustomerFu to Joerg Diekmann at These Lovely Days. He’ll be relaunching the site in the near future and will be operating it thereafter.

Our startup will be launching in public beta in November. We’re keeping the Codevader blog to post about Ruby and Rails stuff as we work on the project. The new project will also have its own non-technical, business-focused blog.

This blog has been really quiet for the last few months while all this was going down, but we hope to get back to more regular posting.

Our latest project to go live is a unique social network for Rareshare.org. Rareshare is a set of micro-communities, one for each of the rare disorders listed on the site.

Sufferers and those affected by the various disorders can find and share information on the disorders, and communicate with other similarly affected individuals.

The site is in beta, but if you know anyone that is affected by any of the listed disorders, or are a sufferer yourself, then please sign up.  

Congratulations to David on this great idea. We wish the site every success!

2008 has rolled along and we’re wrapping up a few projects and getting started on some exciting new ones.

One of our big focuses for the year is to simplify. We’re narrowing the focus of what we do to make sure that we can do it well. The biggest casualty of this is our hosting business which has grown slowly but surely over the last few years, to the point where it is a major distraction at times. Coding is what we’re good at, so coding is where we want to spend our time.

In the next few months we also plan to have launched the first of our own products, which is something we’re really looking forward too.

I started my Rails development on a Windows machine. That wasn’t as bad as you might think - I had GNUTools installed and it was only things like RMagick and file permissions that gave me headaches. But I had an iMac at home that I was increasingly liking, so when it came time for my 3 year old Dell Precision M60 (great laptop!) to be replaced, I went for a shiny MacBook Pro.

Setting the Mac up for serious work has been interesting. There’s some great software out there, but in many categories there’s no clear leader, so its been a little trial and error to find what works for me. This is what I’m using now:

• Quicksilver - essential for any Mac
• iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08. Numbers is a pretty limited, but Keynote is great for presentations.
• NeoOffice - because Numbers is so limited (try importing a CSV that uses non-comma delimiters for instance. Can’t do!)
• Textmate - I’ve still got a lot to learn with this to make it into a useful tool
• muCommander - Finder is pretty annoying sometimes. muCommander is a real power tool
• VMWare Fusion - lets me run IE6 for previews, as well as Quickbooks which I use for billing. Flawless performance so far.
• Thunderbird for mail, with the Lightning calendar plugin. I’m not completely sold on Thunderbird. Leopard apparently has a much improved mail.app, so when I do the upgrade to Leopard I might switch.
• SyncroSVN - unfortunately there’s no Tortoise for Mac. SyncroSVN is the best solution I could find. Its not perfect, but it’ll do.
• Transmit - I tried Filezilla for Mac, buts its just awful. Transmit works beautifully
• iTerm - I gotta have tabs in my terminal. When I get leopard I’m sure I’ll switch back to Terminal
• CocoaMySQL - on the PC I used SQLYog. CocoaMySQL isn’t as powerful, but it still works very nicely.
• JellyFiSSH - a nice tool to bookmark SSH info
• Freemind - for mind mapping. Great for sketching out website maps, or just knocking ideas together
• Omnigraffle - essential for wireframing and drawing mockups of page layouts
• Skype - for our daily communication
• Adium - for communicating with those who don’t use Skype
• Google Desktop - also searches Gmail, which is quite handy
• MAMP - for the odd occasion when I need to do some PHP work
• Max - for ripping CDs
• Burn - for burning CDs and DVDs
• Seashore - a nice free image editor
• Growl - for notifications

And by far the most useful tool - Synergy - which lets me run one keyboard and mouse for the Imac and the MacBook Pro. My setup is the MBP with an extra 20″ screen attached, and the Imac right next to that. So the MBP screen usually has Thunderbird running or some less important task, the 20″ is my main work screen, and the iMac does the browser previewing and runs iTunes. Works beautifully.

This is the blog of the team at Codevader. We plan to post on subjects ranging from the obvious - Ruby on Rails and Agile methods, to more general topics that cross the minds of any team at a web development company. We’ll see what that means in the months ahead.

If you’re looking for my personal blog you’ll find that at www.nickcoyne.com. I’ll stop posting technical topics there (like there were a lot of them) and put those here instead.

When I find some time I’ll also apply some design-love to the blog, but for now we’ll make do with the default Wordpress theme.