If you're a professional developer and don't know about SOLID, consider
your education incomplete. SOLID is a mneumonic acronym describing 5
prinicples that are particularly handy when designing complex object
oriented systems.

Last Wednesday was our monthly hackfest, with a theme focusing on API mashups. Despite a healthy turnout, only 6 projects were turned in when the 9 pm deadline hit, 5 of which were from Quick Left employees.

What: Haxorz, Pizza, Beer

Where: Quick Left HQ

Date: Wednesday, Jun. 29th

Time: 6pm -> well, you know...

Continuing our monthly Hackfest series, Quick Left is hosting an API Mashup Smashup. As hackers we have long practiced the precise art of API weaving to construct fancy Internet creations. Sometimes for good, sometimes for profit, and always for the lulz; and now for PRIZES!

Grab that swank new Chromebook, a couple of your dev friends, and come be a part of the biggest Hacking Event in Boulder... on that particular night.

Can't make it to our office? No worries, submissions are handled with github pull requests so you can participate remotely! Join our IRC channel #QuickLeft on Freenode, and stay tuned to github.com/quickleft/hackfest.

Of course contest participation is not required, but if you want to throw down be sure to hone your curl skills, sharpen your favorite XML parser (*eww*), and bring your A(PI) game.

More details and rules to be revealed at contest start: 6pm Mountain Time, Wednesday the 29th.

The new Google Maps API, while much improved and streamlined, sacrifices some important features for the sake of a lighter footprint. After fighting with the service for several hours, I wrote a helper framework that simplifies the one action I was attempting over and over: dropping markers on a map.

After the initial call to the server to get the latitudes and longitudes for our model, I rendered them to the DOM like this:

A quick run-in with the presenter pattern and how it can help alleviate the pains of using as_json on your models to construct versioned API responses in Rails.