James Wilding Freelance Rails, Ruby, and iPhone Web App Developer

Archive for October 2009

Free Forever?

A year or two ago, I was looking at some community websites when I found one that promised to be “free forever” (they even said “we’ll never charge for our services”).
This kind of promise is stupid. You don’t know what your business will be doing in a year’s time — unless you’re a dedicated [...]

Why I don’t work Fridays

In which I extol the virtues of a four day week and explain why the British work ethic is bad for business.

How To Upgrade To Windows 7

Don’t
Try one of these instead

How To Avoid Problem Clients

Happy Cog’s Greg Hoy recently wrote about how to “figure out which deals are actually worth closing” when it comes to website design. Here’s my take on the same subject, from a small business’s point of view.
When I first started doing bits and pieces of freelance web design and development, I thought I should take [...]

Ruby best-practices: Boolean methods

I’ve been reviewing some code recently and have been struck by a few misconceptions about how to handle boolean (true/false) values in ruby. Here’s an example:
[ruby]
def authorise_to_edit_article
if current_user.can_edit_articles and @user_action == ‘edit’
return true
else
return false
end
end
[/ruby]
That will run, but there are a few [...]