Posts about Blog

MCing at Kings of Code

December 1st, 2012

This is totally last minute, but I’ll be MCing the backend development track at Kings of Code. There are a bunch of great speakers from around the world talking about all sorts fo fun stuff like real-time apps, Git, Go, and more. Hope to see you there!

3 Desks Available in My Office

October 22nd, 2012

Come join me and Frank, an iOS developer, at our office on the second floor of the Volkskrantgebouw and just down the hall from startups like Bottlenose, Ideedock, and Spaaza. The rent is €110.35 a month per desk, including BTW.

The whole web world…

October 19th, 2012

eleven years ago. Brilliant.

Cordova Native Video Plugin

October 17th, 2012

Recently I’ve been working with Arjan on a Cordova (PhoneGap) app for AT5, the local TV station in Amsterdam. While HTML5 video tags work just fine in the app, playing a video kicks you out of the app and into Mobile Safari. Since that’s not the nicest user experience, we wanted to add a native video player plugin to play the videos within the app.

phonegap-videoplayer-plugin is commonly used to do just this, but it doesn’t work in recent versions of Cordova nor is installation totally obvious. So, I took only the most essential files from it and created my own native plugin, CDVVideo. You can find CDVVideo on GitHub.

Talk at TU Delft

October 15th, 2012

Last Wednesday I gave a guest lecture in the course “ICT Design: Valorization and mobile applications,” part of the ICT Management and Design Masters program at TU Delft. I talked for almost two hours on my perspective on the business of app development as a freelancer and independent developer. The students asked insightful questions, and I really enjoyed my time there. For those interested, I have uploaded the presentation.

Heroku and Naked Domains

October 10th, 2012

I’ve really loving running apps on Heroku, but unfortunately their routing mesh means that they only support custom domains on a subdomain (http://www.mydomain.com), not on the raw domain (http://mydomain.com). Luckily today I discovered an option buried in the Google Apps settings to do this:

Just specify the subdomain for which you have a CNAME pointing to your Heroku app.

Then it’s just a matter of setting your DNS A records to Google’s servers. Here’s it in TransIP (the IPv6 addresses haven’t be updated):

option.rb

August 4th, 2012

Because I’m nothing if not consistent, I’ve made Yet Another Option Library, this time in Ruby: option.rb

Setting the AWS region when using simple_record

July 25th, 2012

Because I couldn’t for the life of me find the information in the simple_record documentation, here’s how:

SimpleRecord.establish_connection(sdb_access_key, sdb_secret_key, :server => sdb_region_domain_name)

You can find the SimpleDB region URLs on Amazon’s Regions and Endpoints page.

Email as a message queue

July 24th, 2012

Continuing my thoughts on the continued strengths of email, I throw at the following on Twitter and got a a decent amount of interest:

I think there really might be actually something to this. Email as system is very well-understood and the clients and servers are quite optimized. I have to say, I’m tempted to whip up a proof-of-concept!

Is it raining?

July 19th, 2012

Now you can easily find out with my latest site: isitraining.nl