Getting Started with Docker

I’ve had two people ask me this week on how to learn Docker. Or even where to get started. Fortunately, that is a really easy question to answer. What is even better is the answer is free!

Rather than jumping right to a paid online course or special in person training that typical runs about $2,000, the team at Docker have put together a classroom. A one stop shop to get you rolling. For free. No installations. Seriously. Nothing to install, nothing to hunt for, nothing to wrestle with (I’m looking at you installing Docker on a corporate Windows machine)

The hard part has been solved. Check out Play with Docker Classroom and stop trying to figure out how to learn docker and start learning it now!

How to Nurture High-Performance Teams

High-performance teams within an organization are invaluable to business growth, cultural strength, and empowered individual contributors. It makes sense: working within a group of people who have complementary skills and are able to collectively deliver on goals is motivating and productive.

Source: How to Nurture High-Performance Teams

How to Solve Any Problem

I find most people fail at solving a problem because they first do not understand how to fundamentally solve any problem.

This is a copy/paste from the original source where I found it. I did not want to lose the content as it looks like that site has been abandoned.

How To Solve It is a short volume by mathematician George Polya describing various methods of problem solving. The book has achieved classic status in its field because of its considerable influence.

In reading Polya’s book, I found distinct parallels to popular self development resources throughout history. Although the book outlines techniques used in mathematical problem solving, the same formulas can be applied to the practice of goal setting.

Continue reading “How to Solve Any Problem”

Turntable.fm replacement plug.dj looks great

I was really upset when turntable.fm went offline, it was something I ended up using regularly. Before that site, I really didn’t understand what a “DJ” was, I thought it was just some guy that hit the play button. But the more I used the site, the more I started to understand a good DJ can feel out the vibe in a room and decide where to take it through music. It was quite the epiphany when I put that together. When that went offline, I thought that experience was gone. Then I find plug.djContinue reading “Turntable.fm replacement plug.dj looks great”

Setting Access-Control-Allow-Origin for a rails application

I was experimenting with AngularJS and using Rails as a backend and needed to enable Access-Control-Allow-Origin for $http. Here is a simple snippet I created that does the trick. If you were doing this in production, I would assume Apache or Nginx would be the appropriate place for this code. However, this is just a POC.

# application_controller.rb
after_filter :local_access_control_headers
def local_access_control_headers
  headers['Access-Control-Allow-Origin'] = 'http://localhost:8000'
  headers['Access-Control-Request-Method'] = '*'
end

Well planned and executed marketing by Wegmans

Wegmans isn’t just a super market around here, it’s a destination. Going the store is less about “getting food” and more about shopping. My local store is huge, but it feels comfortable. The selection is massive, but I can always find what I came for. I can also find things that I didn’t come for and didn’t know I wanted until I saw them. So how can Wegmans accomplish this? How can they have a massive store, but yet have items that catch my attention that I wasn’t specifically looking for. The answer: The Wegmans Magazine Continue reading “Well planned and executed marketing by Wegmans”

Upgraded to RubyMine 5, it feels the same as 4.5 to me

I’m still a new RubyMine user after deciding to purchase a license back in September. I was a full time Vim user before that so I wasn’t sure how the transition back to an “IDE” would go. There are pros and cons that I won’t go into, but if I had to pick a Ruby IDE, this would be it. It has a lot of features I need, and not a lot that I don’t. That says something in a world of IDEs that are super bloated…looking at you MyEclipse
First thing I did was finally hook up RSpec to the internal test runner. Previously I would just run them via the command line and a key bind I created “;spec” which would execute “bundle exec rspec”, then tab back to the IDE when it was done. I kind of like the integrated runner, especially when it’s green.
So now I can just hit “^r” and off I go, no more fumbling for iTerm, making sure I’m in the right directory, waiting, switching back…etc.