Last month (20-22 Feb 2013) the Abletech team attended the inaugural downunder RubyConf held in Melbourne. It was a great conference - fantastic speakers, awesome attendees, well run and fun times!  The whole team learnt some valuable...

We've taken the day out from business as usual to "Work" from Waikanae - we've been teaming up to work on some cool ideas...!

Last night we ran the Ruby on Rails bootcamp for Summer of Tech 2012. We mentioned a few good resources for learning more about Ruby on Rails, and I'll summarise these here. 

Agile Web Development with Rails

This was the book that...

We are running the Ruby on Rails bootcamp this year for Summer of Tech at Victoria University. These instructions are for those students attending the workshop.

Calvin and Joseph have been working on a Web and Android Mobile application for Macaulay Metals which is used with their fleet of trucks. Macaulay's drivers carry an Android phone running our application which gives them a real-time list of...

Elasticsearch is my new favorite full text search engine. This example shows how easy it is to store any json document with geo-spatial data and query on the spatial index using elasticsearch and the tire gem

class Location def...

Cameron Prebble and I set off for a few weeks in the States. The first week had Cameron relaxing attending attending an Edward Tufte course on Data Visualisations in New York, whilst I (drawing the short straw) had to field test an iPhone app...

Setting up an IPv6 tunnel on Ubuntu 10.04 is reasonably easy, if you have the right instructions. I recently spent quite a bit of trial and error getting a new server on the IPv6 Internet using a tunnel provided by a local provider. Now that I've worked out the tricky parts, it should be easy for others to get it going.

If your Ruby on Rails application performs any HTTP requests to an external service, you will know they are a pain to test. The issue with these requests is that they are slow. Not only that, they are unreliable. Any self respecting programmer would do their best to avoid having live HTTP requests in their tests.

I previously have found myself creating some sort of XML file to represent the expected response from the request then stubbing out any real calls to just return this pre-made response. The concept is pretty simple, but is slow to set up, especially if you have a few different scenarios to test!

Each summer, AbleTech (and its sister companies) look to hire 5-6 students for internship roles. These seven steps will substantially increase the chances of getting one of these sought after positions.

1. Build your own website