At Icelab, we love Markdown. We use it wherever we can for text formatting. In a web app, the obvious place for it is in large text areas, where we can allow complete freedom of formatting. Headers, paragraphs, lists, it’s all good…

For Ticketscout’s payment processing, we use a custom Rails action with an HTTP streaming response. It shows the user a spinner and a “please wait” message, then periodically sends empty strings to the browser until the credit card transaction is completed. This streaming response keeps the request connection alive longer than the 30 second timeout period that is the default on the Heroku Cedar stack. The technique works well and ensures we don’t ever lose track of any slow-to-process credit card payments…

Each time I come to these posts, the year just past seems more activity-filled than ever. 2011 has been no exception. Another big year, with quite a few notable firsts for me:

As everyone at the lab winds down for Christmas, I’m taking a moment to wrap up my series of articles about the development and launch of Decaf Sucks for iPhone. When you last heard from me, I was rather ebulliently announcing our availability in the App Store. Since then, enough time has passed that we can take a good look at how we went…

We just shipped our twelfth Dispatch, which means we’re fast approaching the first birthday of our monthly coffee subscription service. What a year it’s been!

This Saturday, I am moving to the Philippines!

For a long time, I’ve wanted to spend an extended time overseas, to learn a new place, culture and language, and tackle all the interesting challenges that go along with it. Now, it’s actually going to happen, thanks to my equally adventurous wife and flexible workplace…

We’re thrilled to announce that Decaf Sucks for iPhone is now available on the App Store!

After another two weeks of hard work, the Decaf Sucks iPhone app is finished and submitted to the App Store!

It’s been a whirlwind two weeks building this app alongside our usual Icelab work. Building this app has consumed me from 6pm – 1am every weekday, and all through 3 full weekends. While it’s certainly not a great example of a sustainable development effort, I think it has brought us some great results. Let’s have a look at some of the things that came up as we finished building the app…

Some good but sobering progress on the Decaf Sucks app this week: just enough that it’s still possible to meet our launch date, but only with the most concerted of efforts over the next few weeks…