Tristan Dunn

Late on the follow-up post, but the visit to Boston was a great experience.

The main reason for the visit was to interview at thoughtbot and I am glad to say that I will be moving to Boston and starting work there in mid-July. When I quit my PHP job a few weeks ago I never thought I would be going to work at one of the most well-known Rails companies shortly after. Needless to say I am very excited.

Dan Croak was kind enough to show me some of the town over the weekend. Pat Allan also joined us for the excursion. Sunday I went off on my own to be a tourist on the Duck Tours, stopped by Cheers and had dinner at Union Oyster House.

I look forward to the experience, new beers, and attending Boston.rb meetings.

I will be in Boston from June 9th through the 16th. If anyone nearby would like to meet up on the weekend get in touch. And this does has something to do with a job, but nothing final yet.

Update: Boston is amazing. So far I have learned that vim is bad ass and worth the learning curve. I’ll write a complete follow-up once I am home.

I travelled to Vegas last week with hundreds of other developers for RailsConf. It was my first conference and first time to Vegas. Overall the conference was good, but seemed geared more towards beginners. Vegas was fun, as expected, but best of all the people were amazing.

I have never been around so many programmers at once and had I not been hungover most mornings a lot more interesting conversations would have occurred. The nights did bring some fun times and memories. (#whaledogs) Nothing was better than standing at the thoughtbot poker tournament listening to a testing framework debate in the background. Well, maybe desperately going all-in blind and ending up with pocket aces.

If I gained anything out of the trip it was that I want to be doing Rails for a living, not PHP. I am young and not tied down by anything or anyone at the moment, so I put my two weeks in today. Am I a little scared for not having a job lined up? Yes. Does it still feel amazing to be trying to do what I really want to do? Yes! I can not wait for what is next.

To work on a branch of a fresh remote repository checkout you will first need to create the branch locally. Here is an example for a “gh-pages” branch:

git checkout --track -b gh-pages origin/gh-pages

GitHub recently released issue tracking for repositories. After exploring some I noticed they had voting built in. After a few hours with the API and jQuery I created a simple plug-in, cleverly called github-voice, to display a widget similar to UserVoice.

Currently it is fairly basic and only displays issues, with optional customization and filtering. The CSS is not bundled yet but you can find it on the examples page. I will bundle it once I have tested it in more browsers.

If you have any issues or suggestions, add them to the project.