The Tararua ranges have a fearsome reputation in New Zealand. Frequently cloudy, snowy, rainy, misty, almost always windy, and very occasionally, sunny (though not to be trusted). Despite this bad rap, they are accessible, scenic, and have a broad range of trip options - from short dawdles through the bush to challenging alpine tramps over the tops. With Wellington so...
Note: I can’t vouch as to the best-practise compliance of this technique, but it’s worked well for me. One of the neat things about using a Javascript framework such as Ember.js is that you can host it just about anywhere you like - it’s just static files after all. My first stop for hosting things like this is Github Pages...
The Waikaremoana track is one of the Department of Conservation’s nine great walks, and is located in the Te Urewara area of the North Island, inland from the East Cape of the North Island of New Zealand. Recently, Te Urewera was one of New Zealand’s many National Parks, however a recent Treaty of Waitangi settlement has made the park a...
Note: This blog post was originally posted at the Rabid Brains blog (my employer’s blog). Multistep forms are the bane of the developer’s existence. No matter how you cut it, the fact that multiple request/response cycles are required to create a single resource goes against the grain of a whole bunch of acronyms representing fairly popular patterns and specifications (e.g....
By United States Air Force [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons This aircraft is literally two P-51 Mustangs banged together. I entirely appreciate the thinking behind taking a very successful platform together and doubling the awesome, but I can’t help imagining a number of entertaining scenarios in which a pilot in each fuselage attempts to wrest control of the ‘plane off...
This guide covers setting up If This Then That to check for flights on Air New Zealand’s Grab a Seat service. If you’re not at all interested in cheap NZ air travel, this might not be for you. Grabaseat, Air NZ’s discount flights service, has got to be one of the hottest battlegrounds in New Zealand’s internet. Popular flights sell...
With the recent release of Rails 4.1, has come a feature that I’ve really been looking forward to. That feature is automatic support for storing your application’s secrets in a YAML file. Whenever you have a repository of code, it’s a great idea to always work under the assumption that the code you write could be open-sourced at any time....
As a (mainly) Rails developer, I’m pretty accustomed to the need for secret keeping within a server-based application, and how it gets done (typically, config.yml’s and/or ENV variables). Getting into Android though, I’ve had the need to integrate with Parse to retrieve some simple data that I don’t want to manage a data service for. Since I want to open...
I’m a minimalist. When it comes to web design, I value white space, typography and function. People come to your site for the writing, which is why a focus on these elements will almost always result in a good user experience. Adding non-essential elements to a page reduces signal and creates noise. — Sam Solomon
Very much inline with how I feel about design and UX in general.
This morning, I created a new repository on Github called toolkit. I’m using it to keep track of the tools I use every day, in order to benefit others who are interested in how I work, and for my own benefit, to be able to easily refer to documentation, source code and links for tools that may be useful for...