Projects

I spent a bunch of time the last couple of days sprucing up a few of my personal projects. Today was mostly spent on the lunchomizer, which gives you random suggestions for lunch, based on your location. It still only works for Midtown Manhattan since the locations all come from Midtown Lunch and that’s also the neighborhood where I happen to work. The biggest change today was fixing the HTML5 location support and a much better mobile experience via a separate Rails layout tailored for small screens. All in all, it was pretty easy, but one thing that surprised me was a noticeable lack of a de facto standard library for doing mobile, or really any, browser detection. I ended up using a gem called Nomadic and that worked well with the following controller code: ...

Today I’m launching my latest personal project, srchmvn.com, to help Java developers find Maven artifacts. It’s also the first project I’ve finished* and released in a very long time. The Problem While Maven is, at it’s core, a build system, one of the most valuable features it offers is it’s centralized repository and transitive dependency management for your projects. You can simply include an artifact definition and Maven will, at build time, download and provide not only the selected artifact, but all it’s dependencies as well. ...