I loved writing the Hometown Tourist, and it got great feedback from site visitors and community members. Though I haven't written an article for several years, the website continues to get a good number of monthly page views. I've wanted to get back to it for a long time.....

I've been hunting for the perfect Rails host for sites that I've built for two friends. One owns a small business, and the other needed a personal website for his music. Cost is a big factor, but speed, reliability and security are important, too. I've researched several options - Heroku, WebFaction, Digital Ocean, and OpenShift. Each has different pros and cons, but after trying all of them, I think Heroku is still the best solution for smaller businesses and individuals...

January: I commit to focusing on JavaScript and the FreeCodeCamp program. I even write a blog post about it. February: I get recommendations for Java learning materials and start studying Head First Java. Oh - and I write a blog post about it. March...

Upon further examination, my wonderful date picker solution didn't work out quite as expected. It seemed to work fine in some cases, but other times the record would fail to save. This only happened in browsers that used the jQuery UI Date Picker. (Things worked fine on Chrome, which has a native date picker...)

This week I learned that Safari and Firefox handle date fields differently than Chrome. Chrome provides a really nice, native date picker, and it ensures that entries conform to the correct pattern. Safari and Firefox don't support date fields and treat them as regular text fields instead...

The first cohort of Viking Code School officially wrapped up last week. It was a great adventure. I got to help some amazing students experience an amazing amount of growth in 3 months. I also got to build some tests for the VCS website...

As I started work on a new Rails project recently, one of my first priorities was to set up my test environment and tools so I could use test driven development (TDD) from the beginning. Here are the steps I took, some snags I ran into, and some things I learned along the way...