Zach is currently looking for his next challenge! Reach out if you think he'll be a good fit for your organization.
Zach is a software developer who has worked on a range of projects, with expertise in Ruby/Rails and MySQL performance. He also tinkers with other languages in his free time (currently Go, Haskell, Scala, Clojure, and Rust).
He knows how to laugh at himself and loves to ship software. He is a father of two wonderful kids and a husband to a fantastic wife.
We have been discussing testing styles at work. My team's preference is split on one-assertion-per-test. This describes a hypothesis I have about developers in both camps.
For the past few months I’ve been helping Nicholas Patten take his vision and translate it into an iPad App. I’m proud to announce Spatik was accepted today and is...
Over the past few months, I have been working with Downstream on one of their products Tweetstream. In addition to building features, we have experienced a significant issue with the...
Last night we had our December Michigan Web and Mobile Meetup. We only had a couple guys due to family commitments, but that’s understandable since we’re only a week away...
Last night we had our second Northern Michigan Web and Mobile Meetup and I think this went better than our first. This week I grabbed a couple pizzas from Chef...
Last Thursday we had our first Northern Michigan Web and Mobile Meetup meeting. While eating pizza, we watched an interview with Jason Fried and discussed it afterwards.
Ask anyone who has redesigned their own website or released an open source project, pushing something live can be painful. I think there are two primary reasons for this:
After we moved back home in Elk Rapids Michigan, one thing that I acutely missed was the number of user groups we had in West Michigan. Don’t get me wrong,...
I don’t normally write sensationalist articles, but today I’m going depart from the norm and make a bold claim: I think Twitter’s change to OAuth-only authentication is a waste of...
Michelle Greer recently wrote about viscous online comments on TechCrunch. Unfortunately, over the years I’ve seen a few ugly incidents where a female was singled out online and verbally attacked....
I’ll be the first to admit it: I can work myself to death. Paul Boag recently wrote a great article about the false “badge of honor” regarding long hours in...
All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends.
All things being not quite equal, people STILL want to do business with their friends.
Monday was the beginning of my third week working independent. And these three weeks have been a lot of fun. Very busy, but fun. However one thing that surprised me...
“Finally, I don’t think there’s much value in arguing over who has the most incentive to create good products. The point is you’ll be better off in the long-term if...
Months ago I shared my difficulties with leading others and sharing opinions effectively with Josh Little from Bloomfire. He recommended I pick up the book Crucial Conversations and even mentioned...
Every time I go on an extended vacation I end up ripping through a half dozen books. It’s probably because of a need to catch up on long overdue reading....
I’ve used Harvest Time Tracking for well over 3 years, and they have a quality product. They have also had a published API for quite some time. The past couple...
This past semester I had the opportunity to teach the Advanced Java course at GRCC. Teaching at the college level has been something I’ve wanted to experience for a while...
I’ve been tinkering with Haskell lately, and I came across an odd issue. Let’s say I want to create a class that takes Integers, Characters, and Strings and returns an...
Looks like FeedBurner/Google ended up shuffling some things around. You may need to update your readers to using either http://simplechatter.com/feed/atom/ or http://feeds2.feedburner.com/simplechatter/.
I’m in the process of migrating from Mephisto to Wordpress. Everything should be up and running other than comments. Hopefully I’ll get those wrapped up by the weekend.
For those of you who don’t know, Janson works in Seattle while Aaron and I work in Holland MI. Even though he’s in Seattle, we’re still able to work as...
I’ve been developing in Ruby (and Rails) for the past 2.5 years. Over time, I’ve molded my own flavor of CRUD controllers and resulting specs. Unfortunately, it’s so different than...
Aaron, Janson and I were at Applebees a month ago discussing an estimate for a client. We started talking about a particular part of the estimate that would require us...
Janson and I have been using Git for a few months now at work. We’re still keeping an open mind with regards to Mercurial and Bazaar however its clear that...
Me and a few buddies play Command and Conquer Generals. It’s a decent RTS, but has problematic networking issues. Before giving up, I came across Hamachi which is an awesome...
We have been busting ass for over 2 solid months and last night we launched a new application. Check out Ascribe, a great portfolio management system specifically designed for contractors....
If you’re going to be in San Fransisco around Jan 29th, I’d recommend checking Brandon Keepers Rails Training Session. He’s an extremely talented developer, and an active contributer with a...
So I’ve been itching for a Ruby Hacking Nite for a while. Elevator Up’s going to host a night at our offices on Tues the 22nd starting around 6ish, where...
A question that I’m asked frequently, especially in regards to mock testing is: “I know it seems worth it to test, but isn’t it just a tautology? I mean when...
It seems like it was just yesterday that we brought on Janson. We’re swamped with work, and luckily it’s the kind we don’t want to turn away. However we really...
Ok so not really. RubyConf officially starts tomorrow, but I still had a blast. The highlight of the night, other than meeting some rockstars in the Ruby community like Chad...
I’m really geeked to go to RubyConf this year. A very needed get-away from the hubbub around the office. As a typical dork, I went ahead and threw RubyConf’s schedule...
We’re in the process of migrating our servers onto a new infrastructure. Namely beefy servers running Virtuozzo. I’ve been a fan of Parallels for a while, and recently fired up...
On average, I drive 150 miles roundtrip each day for work. Obviously there a helluva lot of negatives with that commute. However this was a great “opportunity” to turn a...
Last night’s Geeks Group was pretty awesome. It’s definitely a night I look forward to every month. The biggest problem is heading home and starting work the next day. Janson...
After eyeing Liquid for quite some time, we decided to use it on a project to allow a customer template his app from the admin side. After seeing a lot...
Working on a custom CMS, I was tasked to add a feature that allowed users to mark pages as secure. This allowed them to take sensitive data, and then turn...
I’ve been rather quiet the past few weeks due to Brittany and I buying our first house. After 3 years of renting, we felt we were finally stable enough to...
Aaron and I have been talking a lot the past couple weeks about the overwhelming about of work we have at Elevator Up. It really is a good thing, and...
I had the opportunity to attend the XP West Michigan meeting tonight, and listen to the energetic speaker Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree Software.
One of the useful features of Rails servers (Webrick, Lighttpd, and Mongrel) is to see the development log going to standard out. However when using Rails before version 1.2 and...
At Elevator Up I spend roughly 90% of my time buried in TextMate coding in Ruby. Initially I used grep when searching for text out of command line habit. I...
Recently I got Brit hooked on Flickr and it only took her 3 days to hit her monthly bandwidth quota. However, what’s more interesting is that I needed to find...
Most ruby developers who use mock libraries are familiar with either Mocha or Flex Mock. However not many are familiar with the mock library that I use, Hardmock.
As a developer you face many situations where things will just not work, then you have a revelation that points to something so simple that you want to slap yourself....
Previously I spoke about Hardmock, a mocking library. Most of the time I try to develop using Dependency Injection or at least keep instantiation of objects together. However, sometimes the...
annotate_models has been really useful for me. However when using fixture_groups fixtures in subfolders are ignored. I modified the plugin slightly to include them. With luck these changes can be...
One of the things I like about working with Rails is test fixtures. However when the data model becomes more complex, the fixtures can become rather large. Worse yet, tests...
Merge is rather useful, but it has the limitation of staying shallow. Here is a simple extension of an implemented depth merge, with one caveat. Passing in true to delete_nils...
