Bryce McDonnell

I’ve recently been using Shoulda as my testing framework of choice to speed up my Rspec test writing. One common pattern kept recurring which was totally vexing: I wasn’t able to test my custom routes. Just recently, I was writing a reviews controller that is mostly controlled by an admin user of the site. It’s [...]

Inc Magazine is easily my favorite. I love reading about entrepreneurship and have faithfully read this magazine cover to cover for the last several years.
Well, this month I’m fortunate enough to have a small cameo in “The Goods” section on page 54 (see the crm review online). In it, I talk about the merits of [...]

I’ve had a bit of time to finally pursue some open source initiatives that I’ve had cooking in the back of my mind. I’m really excited to release this project I’ve been working on because it showcases work in both PHP and Ruby on Rails. I’ve created a plugin written in PHP that integrates into [...]

I recently returned from a trip to Beirut, Lebanon where I had been doing some humanitarian and mission work. One of my responsibilities was to create a file sharing server for a humanitarian organization.
Given the budget of next to nothing and the relatively small size of the office, I decided it was best to proceed [...]

I was recently deploying a PHP site to a client hosting their content with IIS 7. In my code, I typically raise and handle exceptions. My philosophy is simply that exceptions are logical operators like “if”, “then” and “while”. At any rate, when I deployed this code to the production environment, IIS would raise an [...]

A little while ago, I posted some javascript for a mootools content slider. I’ve used it a lot in my own Ruby on Rails and PHP development work and my work with jv2 I have been itching to just drop it into my code like Squeezebox or Swfobject.
So, here it is, a fairly beta version [...]

This is an old version of an improved Mootools Content Slider

I recently implemented a javascript based slider using MooTools. I’m increasingly becoming a huge fan of Mootools. Their documentation is great and the code I write just seems to be much cleaner. I don’t feel like it’s as fragile as js I’ve written in prototype/scriptaculous.
The [...]

In my backup script I previously posted, we begin by dumping the entire contents of the database to a file. This is not necessarily a good idea and there may be better ways to backup your data. However, the total size of my database is only a few MBs so it isn’t worth the hassle [...]

I am becoming a better systems administrator every day secondary to my work as a ruby on rails and PHP developer. As a very small development shop I have very limited resources to perform the backup and recovery policies bigger shops and huge enterprises employ.
However, after just a morning of futzing with a few [...]