Creating a Robotic Secretary with Hazel, Automator, & Ruby

If you’re on a Mac, and have to do a task more than once, then you need to use Hazel and Automator, full stop. I’m a consultant, and that means I work on multiple projects, and have to bill those projects. Recently, I began working on a contract that required weekly billing, using an Excel spreadsheet that can’t be modified, and a signature from a project manager in another city. Talk about...

4th, 4, and 5: Why I Don’t Start At The Front

This post is mostly a whiny diatribe on how I’m a stupid idiot. Mostly, when I code, I focus on logic: algorithms, object models and other back-end stuff. All the stuff that’s hard and doesn’t give any sort of gratification to the front-end developers or users because, well, it’s not on the front-end. The stuff I like to code are the elegant binary-keyed dictionary structures that route water...

Integration Dream: RubyMine, PivotalTracker, and Github

I’ve been turned on to JetBrains’ RubyMine quite a bit lately. Despite my affinity for more “old school” development environments like Emacs (which I used for many years in my former development life), I’ve really been enjoying working with RubyMine. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s winning my most recent “Screw this IDE crap, I’m going back to a text editor!”...