jonmagic.com posts
My thoughts on software development, team building, and life.| jonmagic.com
How the blind pursuit of automation can distract from the more important goal of building understanding and how designing collaborations may be the future of coding careers.| jonmagic.com
Capture once, reuse everywhere. I record meetings, auto-transcribe, then feed transcripts to AI prompts for summaries, action lists, and architecture drafts. Context Rules Everything Around Me.| jonmagic.com
Reflecting on 20 years as a Rails developer, attending the first RailsConf and the career it led to, and celebrating it's impact on my life.| jonmagic.com
How to add client-side semantic search to your static website, no server needed.| jonmagic.com
It’s that time of year again and I’m asking for peer feedback and writing feedback for teammates and realized I’ve learned a few things about this process over the years that I think are worth sharing.| jonmagic.com
This year flew by with a couple life changing family events, several projects shipped at work, and a lot of learning.| jonmagic.com
Ten years ago I started programming professionally and now I’m a Senior Engineer at GitHub. This blog post begins with a retrospective and ends with what I’m looking forward to in the future.| jonmagic.com
It is interesting to study the gap between the intention of communication and the perception of communication in the context of leadership. “We’re going to do X going forward” can be interpreted as “You’re doing a crappy job at Y so we’re going to try X now” or “We decided that it is better to do X instead of Y because we had a meeting you weren’t invited to since we don’t really value your opinion” and the list of interpretations goes on.| jonmagic.com
In college I learned how to do a SWOT analysis and I’ve been using it in one form or another at work and in my personal life ever since.| jonmagic.com
I’ve never been good at New Years resolutions but this year has been different. Starting the year I decided to iterate on life in a much more deliberate way. Here are the results.| jonmagic.com
GitHub launched the Atom beta this week and the response has been great. As the first day was winding down a coworker suggested we write an FAQ and add a robot to answer the frequently asked questions in the IRC channel where people were congregating. Here’s how we taught hubot to do support.| jonmagic.com
Almost two years ago a friend and my wife saved my life. They got me to go see a doctor because my sleep was a mix of bone rattling snores, deathly silence, and gasps for air. If this sounds like someone you know, help save a life.| jonmagic.com
The past few months I have been building a new team at GitHub focused on solving problems for our business teams. Here are a few valuable lessons we learned along the way.| jonmagic.com
Hi, my name is Jon. I’m an addict. It does not matter what it is—if it makes me feel good, I do more of it.| jonmagic.com
We just finished shipping a six month long milestone on one of our support tools at GitHub. One lesson I learned along the way was focus.| jonmagic.com
As my plane broke through the clouds, descending into Verona, my eyes were met with seemingly endless farm land, a patchwork quilt, broken up by small patches of trees and wandering erratic roads.| jonmagic.com
In the past month I’ve had the opportunity to present this talk twice, first in London England and then in Verona Italy.| jonmagic.com
I’m really excited to let you know that we’ve added full-screen support to presentations on Speaker Deck. This feature has been percolating for awhile, going thru several iterations before we found a solution that we really liked.| jonmagic.com
Ever since Hubot was released I’ve been regular expressing myself. Here is a tool I built to make testing regular expressions in JavaScript easier.| jonmagic.com
While working on an internal app at GitHub I had to write a cucumber scenario that ran expectations against a new tab that was opened. Here is how I did it.| jonmagic.com
It has been a month since Ordered List was acquired by GitHub and our team of 5 joined their team of 50, and it hasn’t sucked at all. Here are some observations on how to remove the suck from acquisitions.| jonmagic.com
This year I authored several RubyGems and just this week finally learned how to work with a contributor.| jonmagic.com
Today I hacked together an easy to use gem for accessing the Gauges API.| jonmagic.com
Today the whole crew from Ordered List joins GitHub!| jonmagic.com
While I initially had issues with the concept of Finish Weekend, I’m really glad I participated and believe everyone involved is better off for it.| jonmagic.com
Ok, so now you’ve got your shiny new hubot up and ready to listen to your every command. But what should we tell him to do with our nonsense!| jonmagic.com
How you can give Siri her very own robot brother with some help from Heroku and HipChat.| jonmagic.com
We need more mentors. Mentors help us avoid mistakes and give us guidance on how to be better at our jobs and at life.| jonmagic.com
Building a career as a programmer requires a lot of hard work, determination, and in my opinion a lot of writing.| jonmagic.com
Looking back at the last two weeks since launching Speaker Deck.| jonmagic.com
We recently ran into issues with certain versions of GhostScript not being able to convert PDFs into images. Here’s how we solved the problem.| jonmagic.com
When did you start using a Mac? Just wanted to share my story and how Steve Jobs and Apple changed my life.| jonmagic.com
How a product was born, from inception to implementation, and distractions to launch.| jonmagic.com
I struggle with remembering great ideas, not so great ideas, things I want to accomplish, and so much more. Let’s talk about the easiest way to hack our lives so we can be more productive.| jonmagic.com
Grim is a simple gem for extracting (reaping) a page from a pdf and converting it to an image as well as extract the text from the page as a string.| jonmagic.com
Want to be a better programmer and a better person? Ditch your coworkers, go out and meet other peers, ask questions, and most importantly, listen.| jonmagic.com
While in San Francisco on our long overdue honeymoon I learned a valuable lesson from our waiter at the Farallon restaurant. While the food was amazing, his confidence and pride in their product was the thing that intrigued me.| jonmagic.com
Ever curious about what the software stack for programs you use looks like? I am, so I thought I’d share what Speaker Deck’s technology stack looks like right now, and then I can look back a year from now and see how much it has changed.| jonmagic.com
Are you using Heroku and want to run a program not included in the Heroku environment? I’m going to show you how.| jonmagic.com
While at RailsConf earlier this year we decided that it would be wise to move Speaker Deck to Heroku and S3, and we finally made it happen.| jonmagic.com
Today was an awesome day at work.| jonmagic.com
Changing the way you live your life sounds weird, and drastic, but I have to admit that I’m really starting to enjoy it.| jonmagic.com
I’ve been emotionally up and down a lot the past few months and a lot of it has had to do with work. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and therein lies the problem.| jonmagic.com
Recognizing someone’s hard work and thanking them for it is always worth it.| jonmagic.com
I’ve been planning on building a 55 gallon smoker for almost a year and a half now, but the time and resources just haven’t been there. Today marked the first day of real progress!| jonmagic.com
Balancing your home and work life can be terribly difficult, especially when you love your job.| jonmagic.com
Sharing in the vision and energy of your team is a key factor to success and happiness at work.| jonmagic.com
Being the new guy in your workplace can be intimidating. It can cause anxiety, frustration, and hamper your productivity. Sometimes it’s your coworkers not making it easy for you, sometimes it’s just you, your mindset, willingness to stretch your limits.| jonmagic.com
I was contracted to build a fairly simple phototherapy treatment time calculator app for one of our clients recently, and in the process learned A LOT about developing for the iPhone and Android using html/css/javascript.| jonmagic.com
As you know| jonmagic.com
How a butler was born.| jonmagic.com
We’re just now back from a great trip to Boston MA, Concord NH, and Milton VT. From trying oysters to a tasting at a winery, our foodie passions drove us to try new things. We made sure to post our reviews on Yelp when we returned home!| jonmagic.com
This summer my wife and I planned a trip to Boston for our best friend’s wedding. While getting ready to book a room I came across an article about airbnb.com, so I decided to give it a try. The first 3 attempts to get a room failed, but each time Airbnb sent me a better coupon so I kept trying. The fourth attempt got me 46 Monument Avenue, and it was the best purchase I’ve made in a year.| jonmagic.com
I’m predicting the death of free in the next one or two years. You heard it here first.| jonmagic.com
While Asterisk provides a simple way to replace sendmail when sending voicemails, the incoming fax portion of Asterisk is not so easily reconfigured. By studying how it handled an incoming fax from the Asterisk CLI I was able to find this perl script: /var/lib/asterisk/bin/fax-process.pl.| jonmagic.com
Just wanted to post a little something while I’m still here at BarCampGR, an attendee driven conference. Its been great fun, as you can see from the many posts to twitter…| jonmagic.com
This article is for small business owners, and even better, for their IT guy/gal… If you are looking at upgrading your phone system, and want to upgrade inexpensively but have a clear upgrade path for the future, I’m going to outline how to build what I believe to be the most cost effective, easy to maintain, pbx based phone system available.| jonmagic.com
My cousin and his wife Karen (i.e. Family) are visiting us this weekend.| jonmagic.com
My uncle has been bugging me to help him with writing some software for awhile now, and this last weekend he sent me another email with a new idea, to help him in his business. I had some time available this week, so I decided to drive down to his shop and try something. My goal was to take his simple idea, boil it down to its essence, and write the whole application in a day using Rails.| jonmagic.com
Whiskey Glazed Pork Chops| jonmagic.com
If you are using a Rhino Equipment card as your PSTN or digital interface to the telco, and need help setting it up on your Asterisk-based PBX, look no further!| jonmagic.com
One of my clients wants his employees to be able to use Twitter, but there were some strict requirements involved, and I couldn’t find a Twitter client for Windows that met all of those requirements, so I decided to write my own Twitter client.| jonmagic.com
What IT guys do when their bored from| jonmagic.com
Nat and I smoked pork spare ribs over this Memorial weekend, and they were so yummy.| jonmagic.com
If you are a software developer working on software for small to medium businesses, then there is a 70% chance (my unscientific calculation) that you’ll run into Quickbooks at some point.| jonmagic.com
There are a few steps in getting the latest Mephisto (0.8.2 at the time of this writing) working on the shared host Site5. As I’m writing this Site5 is upgrading all their servers to Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.2.2, RubyGems 1.3.1, and Mysql 5.0. Thanks to everyone at Site5 that helped, Ben, Beau, and the guy I talked to today (forgot his name). Continue reading for the steps I/we had to take to get things running properly.| jonmagic.com
This last weekend I took my wife to Chicago for her birthday, and her best friend flew in from Boston to join us. We had a wonderful weekend, they got to go shopping, we all got to eat amazing food, and I managed to talk them into going to blues and piano joints rather than dance clubs (except for one place that had Jazz upstairs and dancing downstairs).| jonmagic.com
When I first got started in computers professionally (while still in highschool) I never dreamed I would be a partner in a company that did business internationally. Before I tell that story let me give you some background.| jonmagic.com
I’ve been thinking about using Disqus for awhile now and finally decided to bite the bullet when I realized I just couldn’t get the features I wanted out of Mephisto’s built in comment system.| jonmagic.com
I know it’s not really spring yet, but I can’t help but get my hopes up.| jonmagic.com
Saturday I had barely returned home to Indiana (from MI) when Natalie called me. She was leaving Target and Kohls in Goshen and wanted to know what I was up to. About a minute into the conversation she said “crap, gotta go, the car just died…” A few minutes later she called back, the car was dead, in the| jonmagic.com
Wow, I must have more friends this year than ever! Several friends called to wish me a happy birthday, I got 10 happy bday text messages, and about 20 emails!| jonmagic.com
This is a post from my old blog that I’ve put up for solidarity. To this day I still get emails from people inquiring about this model slicer 😃| jonmagic.com
Thanks to Daniel for creating a nifty new jquery plugin for me! Quickselect takes select/option tags in HTML and turns them into an input box with live search, and can even use the quicksilver.js for more interesting search results.| jonmagic.com
Ok, so last weekend I totally botched the brisket. It was slightly edible, more like a steak than anything I guess, but a really, really tough steak. So, rather than give up I’m getting right back on that horse till I can ride thru to the end.| jonmagic.com
Two weekends ago Natalie bought us a smoker (for smoking meat you silly). This weekend I will complete the trifecta of smoking. The first weekend we smoked pork using this recipe in order to make pulled pork sandwiches, last weekend we smoked a chicken using this recipe and it was amazing, and this weekend I will complete the trifecta by smoking a beef brisket using this recipe (please see the rub and mop as well) from the smoker king himself.| jonmagic.com
I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but I decided to release it anyways… I’ve been working on some software for running my company and needed a nice GUI, implemented in HTML/CSS/JS. I decided, since I prefer using OSX over any other interface, I wanted my web app to look like OSX too.| jonmagic.com
I’ve had a hard time with this question lately, and it has been coming up time and time again. I’ve been praying about, asking for guidance, trying to figure out what I should be pouring my heart into.| jonmagic.com
Last year I got married. Natalie and I had bought a house in Elkhart, Indiana, and we moved there the same week we married and have been making a home here since then. My memory is so bad I can’t remember what we did last fall, winter, or spring, but I do remember most of this summer 😃| jonmagic.com
My worst nightmare happened last night, and I didn’t even know it until late this morning. I was hacked…| jonmagic.com
Man, I was just thinking the other day about all the content I’ve lost over the years switching blogging platforms. Then I listened to a podcast (most likely from Leo Laporte’s TWIT network) and found out about the WayBackMachine on archive.org… I know I’ve heard of it before but always thought “what is that good for anyway???”| jonmagic.com
I’ve been using laptops for almost 7 years now, which means I haven’t really had the need for a desk in the last 7 years (I travel a lot for my job). I’ve been building my gaming rig over the last 2 months (since I’ve only started gaming again in the last few months) and it’s been living on an old dining room table in one of our bedrooms upstairs. While functional, it’s kinda wobbly and just doesn’t have the look and feel I want.| jonmagic.com
Ok, I broke down and purchased the next couple of upgrades for my gaming PC… The first is actually one I linked to on the last gaming pc rig post, the PNY Geforce 9600 GT with 512mb… The second is this little puppy, so I don’t run out of juice 😃 I’ll post how things work once my parts arrive!| jonmagic.com
Ok, so that’s not quite true, I did play some Counter-Strike and stuff last year, but last night and today I really got back into gaming.| jonmagic.com
I know, I know, that’s not a big deal considering I’m part owner in a computer store. But it IS a big deal to me, cuz this computer is going to be my tech/gaming machine for my house. Here is the spec list:| jonmagic.com
Nah, I know, it’s pretty. But has anyone else noticed that they are switching back to IDE? I thought that everything was going to SATA. I guess after reading up that it doesn’t make much difference, but, whatever.| jonmagic.com
UPDATE: This is outdated due to the release of Capistrano 2… I will work on a new tutorial as soon as I have a project I need to deploy… 1-10-08| jonmagic.com
A must read on my mom’s blog. Who knew she could take 15min of thanksgiving table fun and turn it into something worth reading 😃| jonmagic.com
My team at SabreTech has been busy building their own personal blogs!| jonmagic.com
I’ve been using a winxp box in my living room for some time now, and while it works really well, I do find it lacking. Currently it has a 200gb hdd and a 80gb hdd, runs xp pro, has a video card with composite out so I can go straight to the tv, has Azureus and ted to get tv shows,| jonmagic.com
Ok, I’ve setup quite a few Macs for friends and clients, tweaking things (even starting with a fresh install and only installing the necessary components, without any extra bloat), installing useful utilities, and arranging things to maximize workflow. I unfortunately have not recorded this process to date and a good friend of mine needs to reinstall his OS and set everything up due to a hard drive crash, so I guess now is finally the time to write down all the steps…| jonmagic.com
I’m married!!!| jonmagic.com
Wow, in preparation for our open house this weekend we have been on a mad spree: remodeling the office, making line cards, new business cards, gift certificates, new tables and chairs, AND a NEW WEBSiTE!!!| jonmagic.com
I’m getting married August 2nd on a beach in Florida…| jonmagic.com
When we bought SabreTech, Brad and I had our phone service changed and found out a nice little policy of ATT (SBC at the time)… We were paying for a static IP address, which means our internet address won’t change on a day to day, year to year basis… But it turns out, if you make any kind of change to your account, dsl or regular phone stuff, they assign you a new set of IPs… This is a major pain for a company like ours, so we’ve avoided making changes to our account since then.| jonmagic.com
Our wedding has been postponed temporarily, I will let everyone know as soon as we have a new date.| jonmagic.com
I know I know, I market the heck out of JonMagic, but today it’s official… I got my first credit card in the mail with the name Jon Magic on it 😃| jonmagic.com
I’ve got 6 computers, in 2 states, across 4 clients, all shutting down or restarting randomly… This started happening about 3 weeks ago. There are no similarities between these machines—some I built, some are from other local computer places. None of them have the same motherboard or processor… The only thing linking them is they are all running Windows XP.| jonmagic.com
Two years ago while on vacation in Florida I had an epiphany, one of those moments where something just comes to you, and it feels so right.| jonmagic.com
