Joe Sak and I had an amazing time at Windy City Rails 2010 this fall. The conference schedule was filled with goodness on code refactoring and monitoring, rails development best practices, and improving code quality across teams.

I had the opportunity to attend the An Event Apart conference here in Chicago at the beginning of this week and I must say this being my first time at their event I was truly impressed. The presenters were greatly in tune with the...

Nick and I had the opportunity to go to Windy City Rails, a one-day conference for Rails developers, over the weekend. It was a really great day, jam-packed with useful talks. We also learned a ton in the rSpec/Cucumber afternoon session (thanks...

Back in June, I attended the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2009 in San Francisco. It was my first WWDC; I was pretty excited. And San Francisco is pretty lovable.

"What's your story? And do they believe?" These are Edward Tufte's two main points of emphasis behind information design and presentation. Whether these questions are asked by a user visiting a Web site or by an audience experiencing a...

At the RailsConf 2008 kickoff keynote, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software asks: what makes one product massively more successful than another? Why Brad Pitt but not Ian Somerhalder; Herman Miller's Aeron Chair and not the dozen cheap knockoffs;...

Once a year, the brightest stars of the Ruby on Rails world convene to talk, brainstorm, code, teach and learn. This year's schedule offers more technical sessions then ever before. I'm looking forward to four days of design, tips, coding, and...

In the short history of professionals working on the web, there have been many stars -- some, technical gurus who have created languages and specifications that we all use today; others, design wonks who have influenced not only the visual...