Matt Williams

Author's details

Name: Matt Williams
Date registered: August 9, 2008
URL: http://matt@matthewkwilliams.com

Biography

Matt Williams lives in Columbus, OH, in a house filled with computers, cats, books and fiber. Pursuing the goal of being a modern Renaissance person, he plays with his daughter, cooks, roasts coffee, reads, weaves, studies, and hacks, including crazy ideas like a Cloud in a Box. Docker has been an especial passion since June of 2013.

Latest posts

  1. Weaving with Light Pt. 1 — August 31, 2016
  2. Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards — June 24, 2016
  3. Rules for Operations — April 25, 2016
  4. DevOps Creed (Work in Progress) — April 24, 2016
  5. I am not a Mindreader: a mini-saga — April 11, 2016

Most commented posts

  1. Swarming Raspberry Pi – Part 1 — 13 comments
  2. Docker, Cgroups, Memory Constraints, and Java: A Cautionary Tale, or Here be Reapers (sometimes) — 9 comments
  3. Shrinking Docker Images — 7 comments
  4. Rails & JRuby in a Jar — 7 comments
  5. rspec, restful_authentication, and login_required — 6 comments

Author's posts listings

Aug 19

Computer Books which have made me who I am….

Categories:

books, Computers

by

We all have our favorite books, the ones which we won’t let them pry away from our fingers until they’re cold.  Those books which have shaped us, molded us, made us.  The ones for which we’ve bought the first, second, third, and fourth editions.  And not just because you’ve “gotta catch them all”, but because …

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Aug 18

7 Ruby tools which are gems and why I like them

Categories:

ruby

by

Rubygems, those magickal behind-the-sceneslibraries we all use without thinking too much about them deserve some love.  I’m singing the praises of 7 rubygems out of those installed on my laptop (this isn’t to say that I love them more than others). What are some of y’all’s favorite gems?

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Aug 17

.irbc contents

Categories:

Uncategorized

by

I think that irb is one of the most useful tools in the rails toolbox. It allows me to quickly determine how something works, sample results (for putting into blogs, don’tcha know) and makes me a more effective ruby developer. One of the nice things about irb is it’s .irbrc file where you can place …

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2 comments

Aug 15

Just Enough Programming: The missing cornerstone

Categories:

Just Enough Programming, programming

by

I was just speaking with a coworker about JEP. In the course of our conversation I realized that in my list of the foundations of JEP, I had left off what is perhaps the most important one of all — Pragmatism. If I were to sum up and explain JEP in one word it would …

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Aug 14

Quotes on Simplicity

Categories:

Just Enough Programming, programming

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“If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices.” — Thomas Aquinas “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo DaVinci A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected …

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Aug 14

Foundations of Just Enough Programming

Categories:

Just Enough Programming, programming

by

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. — Hans Hoffmann A little while ago I’d come up with the following as a semi-serious description of Just Enough Programming: Are you tired of over architected applications?  Does infinite scalability imply infinite development time?  Are you surrounded by applications …

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1 comment

Aug 13

The trouble with injection

Categories:

gotchas, tips

by

Ruby’s injection is very useful, but if you don’t remember one key fact, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

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2 comments

Aug 13

Drag-n-drop

Categories:

javascript, web

by

Despite reports to the contrary, scriptaculous sortables do not work inside a table, nor a tbody. (as of rails 2.1)

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Aug 13

[adjective] [gerund] websense

Categories:

idiocy, rants

by

I hit a web filter today which makes no sense whatsoever:  http://www.conditional-css.com is tripping the “entertainment” category.

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Aug 12

O_RLY? A Ruby/Rails implementation of snowl (Part I)

Categories:

programming, rails

by

o_rly

Recently Mozilla Labs released a prototype of snowl, a rss/atom/twitter feed reader. It is a firefox plugin and provides two views of messages — a “traditional” message view, as well as a “river of news“. I thought that this could be easily “redone” as a rails application. The rest of this article steps through the …

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