All the latest Bit Zesty news, straight from the team.
Most of us know that documentation is a fundamental part of any software project, but we’ve also learned through experience that producing too much documentation of the wrong kind can be a waste of time. The aim of rapid development is to minimize waste and…
While building our company dashboard, which was mentioned in our previous blog post on SVG with Raphael, I came across a problem with the project management tool we use – Pivotal Tracker. The Pivotal Tracker API is only in XML, which means you can’t do…
Agile software development can seem like the Wild West if you are used to the more rigid Waterfall approach. However, various agile methodologies embrace structured processes that are iterative, collaborative and particularly well suited for fast changing web development. In this blog post, we give…
Whilst searching for a gem/plug-in to help with storing encrypted notes in a Rails app, I came across strongbox. It uses public key encryption to encrypt and store data on an ActiveRecord attribute – Spike has a great writeup on his blog. One limitation I…
Last week, we hosted a lunchtime Q&A session on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at THECUBE. SEO is a process which online businesses can use to maximise their site’s visibility on search engines, and our co-workers had plenty of tips and experiences to share about it….
In the run-up to the 2010 general election in UK, there have been a few high-profile instances of political parties asking their supporters for ideas. Specifically, Labour and the Liberal Democrats invited theirs to submit ideas for campaign posters, while the Conservatives asked the public…
I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we’ve used in the past, explaining why we’d chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do with a cold,…
We recently built a Ruby on Rails application that was receiving a large amount of XML. This as you can imagine was pretty CPU intensive, especially as Rails (ActiveSupport) uses REXML under the bonnet to parse the incoming requests. I started to wonder if it…
Last week I gave a talk at Google OSJam on Raphaël, a javascript SVG library that makes it easy to draw and animate vector graphics on a browser. SVG is one of the many methods of drawing images on the web. Some of the other…