Posts on Andrew McDonough

LinkedIn Messages

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

LinkedIn Messages

I’m trying to significantly reduce the time I spend on email, social media and messaging.

One of the plaforms where I get a lot of inbound connection requests and messages is LinkedIn.

I find filtering connection requests very time consuming, so I decided a while ago it was easiest to just accept all requests.

This does, however, mean I get a lot more messages, many of which are trying to sell me a product or service.

Web Pages Should Not Vanish

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Coming soon

Hello World

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 17:12:03 +0000

The 10 year old Rackspace (previously Slicehost) server running my Wordpress website finally died, so I’m migrating any content that’s still potentially relevant to Gatsby. It’s deployed to Netlify, because who wants to care about personal web servers in 2019?

Ruby Poetry

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday evening, I gave a 20 slide ’lightning talk’ at the London Ruby Users Group (LRUG) entitled “Ruby Poetry”. Inspired by Murray Steele’s “My First Ruby” talk at a previous LRUG, I decided to tell a story about a small progam I wrote about five years ago, when I was fairly new to Ruby. At the time, I had just made the transition to Ruby after years as Java developer, and I was amazed at how easy it was to solve problems without having to write very much code.

Spotkick - Generate Spotify artist links from your Songkick gig calendar

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:32:57 +0000

Update (2019)

I wrote this post in 2010, and this project won’t work anymore.

Recently, I have been consuming a lot of music through Spotify, a desktop application that gives you instant access to millions of songs. As well as listening to music at home, I try to go to as many live gigs as possible. Living in London, there are so many touring bands to chose from that it is sometimes difficu lt to keep track. For the last year or so, I have been helped by Songkick.com, a fantastic online database and community for live music fans. Through the site, you can track your favourite artists, receive email notifications when they are playing near you, and mark any gigs you are going to (which in turn gets fed into my Google Calendar so I don’t forget). When I go to a gig, I like to listen to the music of the performer beforehand, which I usually do using Spotify. I find, however, that I frequently forget to do this, and end up not enjoying the gig as much.

Colorized Logs in Ruby

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:54:34 +0000

Update (2019)

I wrote this post in 2009. In 2019 I believe my approach is a terrible idea. Adding methods to Ruby’s core classes (like String) is asking for trouble.

The logger is a really useful way to tell what is going on in your ruby application, but in Rails, it can be difficult to spot your own log entries when they are mixed up with all the ActiveRecord and ActionController ones. One way of making your own comments stand out is to use color in your logs. You have probably noticed that Rails does this already to make the logs more reada ble, and the effect is fairly easy to replicate yourself. Color in the terminal is achieved using ANSI escape codes, a series of characters to tell the terminal to print the enclosed string in a particular color and style. You could just include this in your logs yourself, but this ends up looking a bit messy. To solve this, I extended String to include a method called colorize. It takes a color (“gray”,“red”, “green”, “yellow”, “blue”, “magenta”, “cyan”,“white”) and a few other optional parameters for styling.

Listening to The Ashes commentary on my iPhone

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:40:27 +0000

Update (2019):

I wrote this post in 2009, so it’s probably not very useful anymore. I’ve left it here, as I am trying not to let content disappear from the web. I also find it interesting historical reasons…

For a while, this was the most popular page on my website, which shows how difficult it was to find streaming audio content 10 years ago. The iPhone had been released two years previously, but publishers hadn’t really made it easy to access their content on mobile devices. It’s amazing how much things have changed

Reply/Star/Archive/Spam - Achieving Inbox Zero using four important keyboard shortcuts in Gmail

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:51:55 +0000

It’s easy to let your email get on top of you. Fortunately, since I moved to Gmail for my domain, it has been to be a lot easier to avoid being overcome by an overcrowded inbox. For the last year or so, I have been trying to implement Inbox Zero, a system that I first heard about from productivity expert Merlin Mann. It involves processing your inbox regularly and moving all emails to a trusted place where they can be processed later. After a single pass, your inbox should be empty.