Virtually every application needs a solid way to organize and store application level configuration settings. There are a slew of gems out that purport to do the work for you, but here is a solution that you can implement in short order, with no external dependencies.

Hi! Welcome to my blog series! If this is your first time here, the general idea is to explore many facets of programming from the perspective of a beginner. This week, we're building off what we learned last week, which was a beginner's guide to SQL!

Hello hackers! This is my ongoing blog series about various topics in web development. Previously, we covered command line usage from a complete beginner's perspective, eventually moving towards some more advanced command line topics.

We'll be firing up the terminal for some examples later on, so if that sounds like something you wouldn't be comfortable with, I definitely recommend checking out last week's post which was a review of sorts.

Ready? Here we go!

Welcome back to my blog post series! Back in January, we set out to learn as much as we could about utilizing the command line from the perspective of a complete and total beginner. I don't know about you, but I've definitely picked up a lot of command line chops just in the process of researching and writing these posts. I thought it'd be useful to lay out what what we've gone over, as both a refresher and an indicator of how much ground we've covered.

If you're curious about programming but don't want to commit to a lengthy course of study just yet, you might be interested in a workshop that Jessica and I are leading titled Playing With Ruby.

Like the other workshops, it's on Wed, Sep 19, the first day of Rocky Mountain Ruby conference in Boulder, CO. We intend for it to be a little different than the typical Programming 101 class:

Greetings, friends! Welcome back to my ongoing command line series. If this is your first time here, you might want to check out some of the older posts before diving in. Today we're going to talk about the 'xargs' command in depth, and then we'll touch on the cut command.

Hi everybody! We're serving up another helping of command line tips and tricks this week. Halloween is a couple months away still, but I'm tentatively calling this feature Trick and Treat. If you have no idea what this series is about, check out my previous posts!

In this article, we'll show you how to create a basic Node.js application using the Express framework and deploy it to both Heroku and Nodejitsu.

Hey everybody, welcome back to my ongoing series on mastering your command line. It's time to command and conquer! As always, make sure you check out some of the other posts in the series.

This past weekend Quick Left sponsored the Boulder Railsbridge workshop. Daniel Stutzman (one of my coworkers) and I attended the event as teaching assistants. This workshop was focused on getting female coders around the Denver and Boulder area to come out and learn Ruby and Rails. Thanks to the key organizers, teachers, assistants, and sponsors, we had about 20 female developers make and deploy a Rails app. Throughout the whole course we actually deployed 3 different apps, and in the end had created a basic voting app.

The event was a smashing success and definitely facilitated bringing female talent into the tech community. If you weren't able to attend this event but were still interested in diving into Ruby and Rails, our very own Bing Chou wrote an awesome post on 5 resources to get started with Ruby on Rails. I also write a Command Line for Beginners series that might help you sharpen your command line chops.

We want to continue promoting female talent in the tech community, and we'd love to hear from you. If you attended this event (or wish you could have helped out), we'd love to see what your thoughts were in the comments below.