Single Table Inheritance

Skip — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:46:00 -0400

Last night I gave a talk on Single Table Inheritance to the Austin on Rails user group. Single Table Inheritance (STI) is a way to have several Rails models all extend from a base class sharing properties and behavior. If y’all haven’t checked out the Rails phenomenon, I wholeheartedly recommend drinking the kool-aid. It’s a fabulous framework and Ruby is a joy to program in.

The presentation went great and I got a lot of good questions from the audience. I used Eric Meyer’s fantastic S5 slideshow code to present with and the slides are up on my personal site (twelvelabs) if anyone wants to take a peek.

Skip On Rails

Kristina B — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:44:00 -0400

Skip will be speaking at the next Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday, April 11th at Frog Design’s Austin office.

Big News At SXSWi

Kristina B — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:08:00 -0500

Handwire will be making an appearance at SXSWi with an exciting announcement. We’re finally going to follow the advice of numerous friends and partners and launch Bugwire as a product.

A while back, Handwire was casting about for bug tracking software that met our needs. We wanted something that didn’t include a thousand other features to crowd the interface and increase the bill. We wanted something simple, low cost and with minimal setup time/effort. We looked and looked and found… nothing quite right.

Around the same time, Rails was gaining momentum and respect in the development community. We were interested, but understandably wary of using a nascent platform on client projects. We decided to apply our curiosity about Rails to the bug tracking problem, and Bugwire was born.

In designing the UI, we treated ourselves the way we would treat a client. It was probably the easiest requirements gathering experience we’ve ever had! Quite simply, our software PMs, testers, tech leads and programmers needed a system to queue up tasks and bugs. It needed to be available to all parties in realtime. We wanted each bug or task to allow file uploads. It needed to be capable of handling a back and forth discussion about each task or bug. Finally, it needed to allow clients to use it without showing them information about all the projects in the system. Visually, we wanted a clear, uncrowded interface.

Within about a month, we had exactly what we needed. Because we’re good like that, and because Rails really is a “rapid development platform”. We’ve been using it, tweaking it and sharing it with our partners and contractors ever since. The response has been resoundingly positive. It’s funny because Bugwire was truly meant to be an internal tool and experiment in Rails, but it’s turned into something so useful for us that we might as well share it and find out if others like it as much as we do.

We still have some work to do to make it available online as a subscription service. Keep an eye on this blog, as we’ll post updates, screenshots and other information here in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can sign up for an invitation to be an early tester at www.bugwire.com. Sign up in the next 2 weeks for a special SXSW gift!

Handwriting: Tag rails

Single Table Inheritance

Skip On Rails

Big News At SXSWi