Helicoid Insider is Helicoid Limited’s blog about design, code and the web industry. This blog will include materials and lessons learned while creating our applications. Comments, guest posts and feedback are more than welcome!

This blog is in addition to our company’s product blog, which provides updates and tips on our web applications.

Who are Helicoid?

Helicoid Limited was officially founded by Alex Young and Gabriel Gironda in 2005, with the help of Alex’s fiancé (Yuka Mizuno) and Kevin Ford. All Helicoid’s applications are currently designed and programmed by Alex, with thoughtful input and copy writing from Yuka, technical guidance and inspiration from Gabriel, and system administration and security help from Kevin Ford.

Continue reading → | blog, news, general

There’s a few things I can’t live without when I’m programming. To that end, this is a list of 10 essential ruby gems that will make your life much easier, even if you only spend a small amount of time working with ruby.

Gems come and go, but these are keepers!

capistrano

Capistrano makes Rails application deployment less of a hassle. It’s also a clever framework for interacting with remote servers. I actually have backup scripts written with Capistrano, as an alternative to Rake/Net::SSH or shell scripts.

chronic

Chronic is a natural language time parser, with the added bonus of having a pun for its name.

Chronic.parse(‘3rd wednesday in november’)
=> Wed Nov 19 12:00:00 0000 2008

ferret

Ferret will make your boss/clients/customers love you. It provides tools for fast text searching, and you can even index PDFs and Office documents. I’ve used Ferret on some p…

Continue reading → | ruby, programming, code, tips | 7 comments

The Helicoid Icon Set is a collection of icons we use in our applications, including:

• Navigational cues
• Credit card images
• Scalable buttons
• Images to enhance web applications

Why are we giving these icons away for free?

As the lead programmer and designer of Helicoid’s applications, I’ve worked ridiculously hard over the last year at two jobs: programming and design. Programming software is my passion, but I’ve had to teach myself design skills in order to get our applications released on a shoestring budget.

I realised there might be a lot of programmers out there in a similar situation (especially open source developers), so these icons are dedicated to you. If you open them up in Adobe’s Illustrator (or try the SVG file with an open source image editor) you’ll find it’s easy to change colours around and scale the icons.

License

These icons are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-...

Continue reading → | icons, graphics, images, free | 2 comments

Test Driven Development (TDD) is one of the techniques I use for creating Helicoid’s products. I’m still the only developer here, so I have to work incredibly efficiently and effectively. In fact, this technique is the greatest secret behind successfully “one man banding” without losing all of your evenings and weekends.

TDD will:

• Help you write better code: by working with the public interfaces from the start you’re encouraged to make cleaner interfaces
• Help design code
• Improve your confidence, ease deployment headaches: your tests will show recent changes are safe
• Communicate your intentions to colleagues (or yourself in the future!)

Don’t worry about UML, XP or any other unfamiliar jargon

There are plenty of books about TDD, and on the implications of it. Don’t read books about TDD, just start doing it right now.

1. If you don’t already write tests, look how people usually write unit tests in your project’s language
2. Take one of your project’s classes, and thi…

Continue reading → | testing, programming

Artist Kent Rogowski creates montages using puzzle pieces from different jigsaw puzzles. The resulting images are both spectacular and surreal, and definitely inspiring if you’re a programmer knee deep in plugins, libraries and web mashups.

Continue reading → | art, artists

After putting it off for several months I finally wrote a Dashboard widget for one of our applications, Tiktrac. What I wasn’t prepared for was the overwhelming response launching the widget had. Not only did existing Tiktrac customers email me numerous thank you messages, we also got hundreds of new signups for the application.

If you’ve been putting off building a widget for your service, our advice is: do it now!. Here’s why:

• You can submit your widget to Apple.com. If it gets listed, potentially millions of people will be exposed to your site
• You can submit it to other widget/gadget sites like DashboardWidgets
• They’re easy to build (trust me)
• People are more likely to continue using your site after signup if they have a desktop connection to it
• If your widget looks cool people will link to it, making your site/product easier to …

Continue reading → | marketing, advertising

I’ve recently been providing consultancy for a few companies in London, advising them on skills and technologies that will improve the efficiency of their software developers. One thing these businesses didn’t do was version control. After explaining the basics I noticed people struggle with the “softer” skills required, and this raised the question: what’s a good commit message anyway?

It’s worth remembering that version control excels when it improves communication between developers. Log messages should form part of the evolving documentation of a project, where well-crafted messages become an asset rather than extraneous baggage. It’s important, especially in terms of saving time in the future on maintenance, that the people on your team understand how to write useful log messages.

In general, a good log message:

• Doesn’t contain references to changed files: version control systems do this for you
• Uses class or method names: make it easy for people to search in th…

Continue reading → | vcs, subversion, programming

Running a professional web application isn’t an easy thing to do. Even the most finely crafted and well tested code will have bugs somewhere, so we try to employ as many tools as possible to cut down time spent on bugs. Unfortunately, customers often won’t even report bugs, so if you’re not careful people will leave your service without even telling you something is wrong.

One technique we use to catch bugs is error email reporting. Depending on your development environment, it’s relatively easy to catch exceptions, display an error page and email your support staff.

Why are error emails so useful?

• You can get in touch the person that caused the error to ask for more information about what they were doing, and to also let them know you’re dealing with the problem
• Letting your customers know you’re aware of a problem even before someone raises a bug report is professional and good customer service
• In our experience emails …

Continue reading → | programming, maintenance, management