https://martinisoftware.com/ Recent content in Welcome on Martini Software Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 24 Jan 2022 01:06:21 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/refresh-2022/ Mon, 24 Jan 2022 01:06:21 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/refresh-2022/ I created this site nearly thirteen years ago with such beautiful ambition and aspiration. If you look at the archive you’ll notice I really didn’t stick to that plan at all. When the mood strikes me, I write and post. Simple. The RSS feed on the side can be a good way to keep a passive tab on me in your favorite RSS feed reader of choice. A new (semantic) frame Every time I commit to rebuilding this site I check out the latest and greatest techniques for building websites. https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-leap/ Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:30:00 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-leap/ I distinctly remember my mother’s voice over the phone, “Why can’t you get a real job like washing dishes at a restaurant?” She said after I gloated about being paid to repair a computer and help fix some software for the first time ever. At the time I was 13 and it was my first ever paid job over the summer making a whopping $75. I had to file a special document with my school and the state to allow me to work for money in a local computer store and my father reluctantly agreed to sign. https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-next-chapter/ Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:30:00 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-next-chapter/ They say you should live your life without regrets and I would agree with them. I was doing well with this notion until I sat down at a deli with the CTO of a local high tech startup. It was then I had my first regret in my career. We were very seriously discussing the idea of completely re-writing a Microsoft based software stack to Ruby and Linux. It sounded challenging, kind of crazy, but immensely interesting. https://martinisoftware.com/post/hanging-up-the-chef-coat/ Fri, 28 Dec 2018 00:37:22 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/hanging-up-the-chef-coat/ I remember it like it was yesterday. Wandering in to the #chef channel on the freenode IRC network and asking some naive questions. Recounting the story at ChefConf this year had me nearly in tears as I looked to the audience and saw great friends looking back at me who have helped me along the way in the Chef community. As the title suggests though, I’m approaching my seventh year and after a great deal of thought I have decided to hang up my Chef coat. https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-new-elephant-in-the-room/ Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:30:23 -0600 https://martinisoftware.com/post/the-new-elephant-in-the-room/ There are many headliners in this news this year. Among them being Twitter and its ever changing APIs which aim to hamper the ecosystem of applications supporting the platform. I’m not sure what the real descision process was behind them removing so much of their support for external clients, but it resulted in my favorite clients and integrations being gutted. That gutting forced me to re-think how I want to be part of the social media landscape, so it was time to make a change. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-09-02-the-future-of-chef-rvm/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-09-02-the-future-of-chef-rvm/ It was over a year ago that I asked Fletcher if I could help him with chef-rvm and he enthusiastically said yes. If you have been following or recently glancing at the project, you’ll notice it has been a little while since the last release. To put it short, both Fletcher and I have been extremely busy with other projects, work, and life in general. I personally had some [demons to battle][demons] and disconnected from all of my projects at once to let me recuperate. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-05-02-burnout-my-struggle-with-imposter-syndrome/ Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-05-02-burnout-my-struggle-with-imposter-syndrome/ Sometimes the assumption from others is that my job is easy. I sit in front of a computer all day and type on a keyboard. How stressful is that? Very. I always equate it to running a marathon in your head. You are constantly practicing, making quick decisions, acting on instinct, always driving, and generally being amplified by Caffeine. When you begin piling on all those responsibilities and doing too much for too long, your brain will give up and you’ll hit burnout. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-02-21-some-well-kept-chicago-developer-secrets/ Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-02-21-some-well-kept-chicago-developer-secrets/ More than once (especially by software development students) I have been asked for tips on networking and learning about software. It’s not a big set of tips, but useful information to know for people looking to break into this career or need to expand their horizons. Remember this is my advice and personal opinions. If you disagree or think I’m missing somwthing, please contact me via the various mediums at the bottom of the page. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-02-14-my-remote-life-lessons-and-tips/ Fri, 14 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2014-02-14-my-remote-life-lessons-and-tips/ For nearly two years I have been working remotely for Treehouse and I’d like to share some lessons learned along with a few tips of how I adjusted. Be warned that some of these tips are a little biased around some of the benefits and current structure of Treehouse. Also know that these are my personal views and not that of Treehouse in particular. Shifting to a remote-based working style has been a little bit of a struggle, but I’ve learned to embrace and enjoy its affordance of freedom. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2013-05-03-don-t-be-nervous/ Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2013-05-03-don-t-be-nervous/ Hi there. My name is Aaron Kalin and I’m here to tell you “Don’t be nervous.” Actually, I’m really here to talk about how to break out of your shell. People in technology, especially developers, tend to be introverted. Nothing wrong with that, but it can’t hurt to be a little social and put yourself out there. I’m going to share my short story in the hopes it might inspire others out there in a similar situation. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2013-03-08-you-have-only-yourself/ Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2013-03-08-you-have-only-yourself/ I’m not one to write poetry, but I woke up one morning a few months back inspired to write. At the time there was a fair amount of drama going on twitter (when is it not?) and that likely inspired my writing. This was well received as a lightning talk at SCNA last year and I wanted to share this with everyone. “This is terrible, who the hell wrote this?” I hear in an office. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2012-08-06-better-presentations/ Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2012-08-06-better-presentations/ I’ve had a few people ask me for advice on how I approach creating presentations. This was broken out from my “Choose your own adventure” talk that I didn’t get to cover, but I felt this is worth recording and releasing to help anyone with curiosity about my approach to making presentations. Check out the video below: https://martinisoftware.com/post/2010-09-20-rails3-and-cucumber/ Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2010-09-20-rails3-and-cucumber/ Diving into Rails 3 has been fun and frustrating these past couple of months. There have been ups and downs, frustrations and entirely new experiences learning this framework all over again. Overall, I am incredibly impressed with the changes made to the framework. I look back at my super-old Rails 1.0 projects when the framework first hit to now and I honestly can’t recognize what I wrote back then. Back then Rails was an unpolished, rough framework with a noble idea of crushing the notions of XML configurations and repeating yourself. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2010-04-12-adventures-in-automation/ Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2010-04-12-adventures-in-automation/ Been a little while since my last post here. A short explanation of the last 4 months in bullet point format: Moved to Tampa Turned 25 Overtime at work Studying for the CCNA and A+ exams Time was a precious commodity the past few months and I finally got a chance to breathe, collect myself and write a new post. While trying to write this post, I managed to update some of the code running this blog to help automate posting and updating of my resume. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-11-22-dusting-off-the-cobwebs/ Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-11-22-dusting-off-the-cobwebs/ Took many months, but I finally found some time to clean up and update my site design. I owe a lot of the inspiration and code to Dan Cederholm’s new book Handcrafted CSS. My strong suit is not web design and I have always struggled with keeping up on the latest innovations in that area. Lately, I have made a conscious effort to follow leading designers and their published material. The books that stuck and got me thinking differently were the books authored by Dan Cederholm. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-07-31-nokogiri-on-leopard/ Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-07-31-nokogiri-on-leopard/ My first experience with Regular Expressions was writing whats called a web scraper to fetch weather data from Weather.com. Back then, this would involve a ton of IF statements and a large array of data. Very tedious and time consuming, but it was very educational. Today, Ruby has a couple convenient libraries built for this sort of task. Even a way to mimic a browser so you can get to pages normally reserved for site members. https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-07-19-haml-and-sass/ Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/2009-07-19-haml-and-sass/ Getting back into the latest Rails and installing the latest version of the greatest HTML markup system ever was a little tougher than expected. Turns out the new hotness with Rails since 2.1 is to config.gem everything, which makes sense. This doesn’t work well for things like HAML, which expect to be plugins. Luckily you can conform to the new trend without littering your vendor/plugins folder. Installing HAML and Sass You must first do a basic gem install of haml thusly: https://martinisoftware.com/post/adventures-in-makefiles/ Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/adventures-in-makefiles/ Writing Makefiles is painful. Especially in multiple platforms. Check out the source code to any C or C++ based application to see what I mean. You’ll quickly lose your sanity wrapping your brain around the syntax, scope and depth of these files. Thankfully there are tools out there to make this job much easier, but which one? I chose Premake. Looking Around Initially I gave CMake and Scons a good run for the money. https://martinisoftware.com/post/first-post/ Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://martinisoftware.com/post/first-post/ Whew! After many years of on and off editing, I finally built a site that I love to call home. Big thanks to the folks at Github for adding this feature to their service. Seems that every time I look at the site, there is a new feature. Now my plans are to post at least once per month with topics about programming and other geeky stuff. I’ll be making my first real post in the next couple of weeks.