Here's part two of an overview guide to using Sinatra, Haml, and Postgres to quickly build a simple inquiry form web app & deploy it to Heroku
Posted 05 / 20 / 2013 by
Edward Sharp
Here's part one of an overview guide to using Sinatra, Haml, and Postgres to quickly build a simple inquiry form web app & deploy it to Heroku
Posted 05 / 08 / 2013 by
Edward Sharp
At SingleMind, we're integration geeks. Our geek nerves tingle over custom systems integration projects, Yahoo Pipes, Zapier, If This Then That and so many others. We use Redmine as our issue management system and Harvest for time tracking &...
Posted 04 / 30 / 2013 by
Edward Sharp
A quick start guide for using Vagrant to quickly bootstrap a VirtualBox virtual machine with Puppet and RVM!
Posted 04 / 11 / 2013 by
Edward Sharp
Ron Johnson, JC Penney’s CEO, has been fired after about a year and half on the job. Johnson’s tenure was plagued with losses including a $552 million loss in a single quarter.
Posted 04 / 11 / 2013 by
Russell Silva
Do you know how often your message delivery fails? Do you get an error when it does? If not, you could be putting your systems at risk.
One of the key, often-overlooked issues in systems integration is how messages between systems are passed. Even...
Posted 04 / 10 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
As we’ve noted before, it’s critical to keep your mobile app’s lifecycle in mind. The work doesn’t stop post-launch. If you’re serious about gaining traction in the saturated app marketplace, you should be optimizing user acquisition and experience...
Posted 03 / 27 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
A mystery
Let’s say I test network speed by copying two files using scp to a remote server.
$ ls -l file*-rw-rw-r-- 1 russell russell 104857600 Mar 21 11:53 file1-rw-rw-r-- 1 russell russell 104857600 Mar 21 11:53 file2$ scp -C file1 server:file1 ...
Posted 03 / 22 / 2013 by
Russell Silva
Software has grown into a quarter-trillion dollar industry in the U.S. Yet even with all the money we pour into software, there’s a lot to be desired.
Custom software development can fill that gap – but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Back in...
Posted 03 / 18 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
The explosive growth of mobile app usage signals massive opportunity to be had in the space, but now developers face their biggest challenge yet: app discoverability.
Not only do developers have to contend with a rapidly evolving industry; they’re...
Posted 03 / 06 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Successful system integrations are like diplomacy: you need to establish certain things from the start. Like who gets the launch codes? How do we deal with spies? What are we going to do about that militarized cult of personality?
Okay, maybe that’...
Posted 03 / 04 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
The eTextbook market has been a subject of interest for educators, publishers, distributors, tech companies and students alike. In 2011, the higher education market for eTextbooks grew 44% to $267 million.
So far, eTextbooks have claimed about 6%...
Posted 02 / 27 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Every app has a lifecycle. In today’s saturated marketplace, maintaining a high level of quality control through each and every phase is critical to an app’s success.
From design to development to marketing and maintenance, there are so many...
Posted 02 / 21 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
UX design - or user experience design - is aimed at aligning business goals and user goals as closely as possible in mobile apps, websites and pretty much any product. Good UX design can yield incredible improvements in buyer behavior, lead...
Posted 02 / 19 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Competition in the app marketplace is fierce, to say the least. Everyone and their mothers are jumping aboard the mobile app gravy train in hopes of an express ride to the fabled Money Mountain (which was coincidentally built on Minecraft – Pocket...
Posted 02 / 07 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Large companies have always relied – well, for the past few decades, anyway – on software applications to provide critical business services. Everything from customer relationships to business intelligence to supply chains is managed with complex...
Posted 01 / 25 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Custom systems integration can deliver major benefits for an organization. At the same time, it’s more often than not a very involved undertaking. A few years ago, it was understood that as many as 70 percent of enterprise application integration...
Posted 01 / 13 / 2013 by
Chris Toler
Okay, so maybe it’s clichéd and sentimental, but the end of the year always makes me reflect. What were my goals for the year? What did I accomplish? What did I learn?
Personal musings aside, a lot happened in 2012 – especially in the eLearning...
Posted 01 / 01 / 2013 by
Cort Buchholz
Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the default point of entry for Internet users. For online businesses, the old “adapt or die” adage rings more true every day. The need for mobile-optimized experiences is clear, but there are multiple approaches...
Posted 12 / 05 / 2012 by
Cort Buchholz
When we were approached by Kaiser Permanente to create a site that could seamlessly sell and deliver healthcare education, we immediately turned to Drupal and Moodle.
Drupal provides a versatile front end that supports eCommerce functionality....
Posted 11 / 21 / 2012 by
Cort Buchholz
The Learning Management System (LMS) marketplace has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Open source alternatives to Blackboard – Moodle in particular - have not only proved viable, but are now outperforming the leading paid LMS.
Independent...
Posted 11 / 07 / 2012 by
Cort Buchholz
In the fast paced lives of consumers today, everyone is looking for the advantage that a viable presence on mobile devices offers. With projections of mobile web use matching or even exceeding desktop web use in the next few years, mobile...
Posted 12 / 22 / 2011 by
Richie Harris
SingleMind, a small software development consultation firm in the Portland area is looking for a multi-discipline technologist to join our growing team. We need problem solvers who are just as comfortable with systems administration tasks as they...
Posted 10 / 25 / 2010 by
Cort Buchholz
You know that all Google/Gmail accounts are also OpenID identities, right? Well, assuming so, have you ever wondered how you can use your Google/Gmail account as an OpenID sign-in to a website? Here is one way of doing such...
Visit http://openid-...
Posted 08 / 23 / 2010 by
Cort Buchholz
Using Varnish and Pressflow together is an effective way to maximize the potential of your hosting environment, and can yield extraordinary results. The problem is, if you're not intimately familiar with Varnish, or the Linux command-line, getting...
Posted 08 / 10 / 2010 by
Chris Toler
We provide hosting for some of our clients. In setting up our hosting infrastructure, originally, we housed a few PowerEdge servers at a local colocation facility. This has suited us just fine, and the company has been very gracious to us. Having...
Posted 05 / 01 / 2010 by
Chris Toler
I spent quite a bit of time recently looking for a 'Terms & Conditions' support module for Ubercart 2.x (Still in beta). There's a contributed version of this for Ubercart 1.x, but I wasn't having any luck finding updated contributions available...
Posted 02 / 16 / 2009 by
Chris Toler
Of the myriad complaints and issues (and their corresponding fixes) I've watched crop up over the last few years about SWF transparency and the wmode parameter i never thought for a second that when i would face one of these issues it would defeat...
Posted 01 / 22 / 2009 by
Brian Merz
When a client asked us to give their site a facelift, my first thought was to turn to Drupal. It is, after all, a powerful social networking application. And then the bombshell dropped. The client's website was an online store originally built in...
Posted 06 / 19 / 2008 by
Chris Toler
Despite its widespread use, Ant is ultimately inadequate as a build system. In some ways, it is well-suited for building simple Java projects: It is integrated with the JVM and extensible in Java, and it has an established library of code for a...
Posted 06 / 04 / 2008 by
Luke Maurer
We have developed a custom Drupal module for a client that I'm really excited about. We are in the process of contributing it to the Drupal community and I wanted to get the word out.
The module is called Cred, and it allows users to create nodes...
Posted 06 / 02 / 2008 by
Jacob Pappe
Just as I expected, with the rise in gas prices public transit ridership is on the rise!
Someone at Trillium Solutions (probably Aaron) posted here, a good synopsis of the situation.
I also appreciate their discussion of how technology (Google...
Posted 05 / 14 / 2008 by
Cort Buchholz
The Goal: Instead of using the Windows command line, use a Putty terminal that connects passwordlessly to an sshd server running on localhost.
Anybody who has used ssh on Linux for any period of time has probably done something like this to allow...
Posted 05 / 01 / 2008 by
Jacob Pappe
Hey folks, check out the Case Study that Danube authored. I think they did a pretty good job capturing the positive impact that Scrum had on our project.
Link to the PDF: http://www.danube.com/docs/case_studies/SingleMind_case_study.pdf
Link to...
Posted 04 / 24 / 2008 by
Cort Buchholz
