Blog

Lumber

Lumber is Burningpony ‘s flagship, a End to End Sales, Customer Management and Inventory tool, built for the reclaimed lumber industry and the chaos that comes with the business. Built with a mobile and dynamic workforce in mind lumber brought a paper business into the 21st century, where on the road sales team don’t have to call in orders, or management doesn’t know what’ s happening in the shop. Lumber is our pride and joy and will become our first public facing product in mid 2013.

Features

  • Quickbooks Integration
  • Job Notifications
    for accounting and your shop.
  • A highly usable order interface built on proven but bleeding edge technology.
  • Scalable to thousands of workers.
  • Full Text Search
    for finding the job that you placed to some city in Korea 12 years ago.

Introducing PDFthisDomain

Inspiration

The other day I had a client ask for a print out of the website, He was hoping to be able to mark stuff up by hand. As a sympathizer of old school paper and it’s merits I almost immediately said sure, not really sure what I was getting myself into.

A long story short after a good amount of searching for a tool to speed the process along, there isn’t a web service / program that will just turn a live website into a pdf. Well I guess that shouldn’t be too hard to make…

Hacking Time

PDFthisDomain is a very simple Sinatra app that has three components. A Sinatra app, a redis instance and a single worker. A user is first prompted to enter a URL which I quickly spider using anemone a sweet ruby web crawling gem. Once the spider is complete you see a list of urls that are available for rendering. Select which urls you want and enter a valid email, and off it goes to background processing. When the render is complete you should get a link to a zip file on S3 for you to download.

PS: Emails are only stored until

your job is complete. No worries 😉

My journey into testing (An RSpec-2 Factory Girl and Guard Tale)

Testing has always been to me this thing of, “if i had more time”, or “if the project had money to cover testing.”, but I have begun to realize that testing can be development as it not only helps guide good programming it makes it much simpler to keep your code in tip top shape.

As this is part 1, I wanted to talk about setting up testing environments. This is something that I feel like isn’t talked much about on the web, yet it is something almost all people expect when working on open source projects, “Could you add some tests to your code?”.

My environment.

gem 'rails', '3.1.3' ... gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.0.1", :group => [:development, :test] gem 'guard-spork', :group => [:development, :test] gem "factory_girl_rails", :group => [:development, :test] group :development do gem 'spork', '~> 0.9.0.rc9' #Greatly Speeds up Automated Testing gem 'guard' #the magic of automated testing gem 'guard-bundler' gem 'guard-rspec' gem 'growl' gem "progress_bar" gem 'ruby-debug19' end 

rspec-rails

rspec is an alternative testing framework, read more about it here

RSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development tool for Ruby programmers. BDD is an approach to software development that combines Test-Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, and Acceptance Test-Driven Planning. RSpec helps you do the TDD part of that equation, focusing on the documentation and design aspects of TDD.

I am still learning the fundamentals of RSpec so I will follow up on this

Guard

Guard has worked out to be my controller of my testing environment. It’s primary role is to simply watch for changes and perform action when a change in my code is detected, typically through a filesystem event such as saving a file. It has an impressive list of “guards” that can be found on it’s wiki, and I will talk about a few I am using but you really should check this out. Coupled with growl it is an amazing tool.

Spork and Guard-spork

Spork is a time saver, Plain and simple. It launches your rails environment in a separate process that it can fork as you go through your testing. Basically it prevents you from loading the entire environment on ever test run, as our goal here is an auto test environment were tests will be run constantly the quicker the feedback on the code the better.

Guard-Bundler

Automatically runs bundle install when a change in your gemfile is detected (Awesome)

Growl

This is the icing on the cake of Guard growl notifications of all the guard output to keep your focus on the code. Without removing focus you get your testing status.

NeuMedics

NeuMedics is a privately held drug development company formed in Washington State in 2008. Its three co-founders combine more than 60 years of experience in executive management, drug development, and regulatory approvals. The Company has created a proprietary new compound (NM108) that holds great promise as a preventative treatment to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia symptoms. The data from preliminary studies confirm that NM108 has the potential to become
“Lipitor
® for the Brain”for as many as eight million at-risk patients in the United States alone.


William And Mary DC

William and Mary in DC came to Burningpony with a very common situation. The company that had built there custom application software was out of business. Burningpony accepted the challenge of re-hauling and rebuilding this complex system. Today, we maintain two systems for W&M in DC, a custom system called “Apply” and a new WordPress, gravity forms mashup to allow them to quickly get information from their student body in on off forms.

 

Olark + WordPress Better Together

We rebuilt the Olark For WordPress plugin to support some of the new fun stuff that the Olark guys have been working on.

The old Olark Plugin hadn’t been updated in almost two years. We just had to jump in a show off all the sweet new features Olark has been working on. The real feature improvement is the new integration with Olark’s JS Api. This lets an Olark Operator know if a user is logged into WordPress and their relevant information. This should work in BuddyPress as well so it could be a huge step forward in your ability to support your clients or product with Olark on a WordPress installation.

A quick blurb on Olark

Olark provides clean integration with tools you already know and love so you can actually focus on selling and support. In fact, we’re the only live help tool around that was built from the ground up to work with a host of standard instant messengers. But did we skimp on the power? No!

Features

  • In Plugin Olark Signup (v2.4.1)
  • One Click Chat Tab
  • WordPress user Information in Chat (Olark API)
  • Call Out Widget
  • Async Loader
  • **Planned Color/Customizing of the Chat Tab.

If you need support Write a comment below.

Get the latest code from WordPress Plugin Repo HERE

The Road will Lead you There

Cycle – Studio is a new spin / yoga studio in Alexandria, VA.Opening to the Public April 29th, it ‘s lead by an enthusiastic owner Sima Tammadon. This project was awesome, the team that Sima had compiled had a huge amount of talent from the Designer/ All Around Graphics dude, Frank, Caitlin in PR and all the builders that made the final result near perfect. The project itself was large, implementing integrations in POS with online services for scheduling, which all tied in to a custom website. You can see the website here. The software package used was MindBody Online which is a suprisingly powerful platform for businesses of this type, I was amazed someone still used ASPX though, but they have done a great job keeping an
effective tool up to date.