Category: Pathfinder General

Ruby on Rails Internship

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, September 23, 2009 @ 3:07 pm

If you're an ambitious new Rails developer in Chicago who wants to work along side Dr. Noel and our other sage Rails developers, check out our Rails Internship.

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ruby on rails

Launched: Vu360 PDF Annotation and Markup Application

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, September 14, 2009 @ 9:18 am

Vu360, the latest Pathfinder product, was launched by our client the Blue Book of Construction earlier last month.

It’s an Internet-tethered desktop application that enables easy viewing, markup and takeoff of PDF and TIFF documents for the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Some of the features include:
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software development best practices

Does your project have Code Ownership Culture?

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, September 2, 2009 @ 12:09 pm

Code Ownership is a well known term in software development. Depending on how you define it, it may be a good thing or bad. When a developer sees code-ownership as him/her owning a piece of codebase that only he/she understands enough to make changes, it is generally a bad thing. It is only when everybody is free to modify the code with a sense of responsibility that he/she should leave the code cleaner than how they found it, it is a good thing. In my view, code-ownership is a good thing when viewed as a responsibilty as opposed to a right. I view it as a Collective Code Ownership where code is not owned by a single person or pair but is owned by an entire team.

So, the question is: How to determine if your project/organization has that collective code ownership culture. And what team members (including managers ) can do to create/encourage it.

Does your project have collective code ownership?
Here are few things you may want to ask yourself to determine if your organization/project has collective ownership culture.

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Software Development

Rails Test Prescriptions to be Published by Pragmatic

Bernhard Kappe, Wednesday, August 19, 2009 @ 3:33 pm

Rails Test Prescriptions, the eBook put out by Noel Rappin, Director of Rails Development at Pathfinder, has been picked up by Pragmatic.

Congratulations to Noel - he's done a great job of furthering testing best practices in rails, and this is a great reward. As he said "I’m very excited by this. I’ve wanted to work with Pragmatic for as long as they’ve been publishing books, and I’m thrilled that this particular project will be able to get wider distribution and access to Pragmatic’s editorial expertise and skill."

* The current free “Getting Started with Rails Testing” ebook will continue to be available. If, at some time in the future, there’s a better Getting Started tutorial in the Pragmatic book, it may be offered as a replacement.

* The update site for current Rails Test Prescription owners will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.

* There will be one more official update to the current Rails Test Prescriptions, probably around the end of August. This will wrap up the chapter or two I’m working on, and tie up some other loose ends.

* After that, errata and information about changes to test tools will most likely be handled via this blog and an errata page on the rails test prescriptions site.

This is Noel's 4th book with a major publisher, following Professional Ruby on Rails, wxPython in Action and Jython Essentials. We're happy for Noel and happy to have him at Pathfinder.

Related Services: Ruby on Rails Development, Custom Software Development

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Software Development

Snow Leopard: the Obvious Choice

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 @ 11:00 am

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released back in late 2007, I told a colleague at the time that Leopard was, by far, the worst release Apple ever put out. You can pardon a bit of hyperbole there, but after a healthy string of solid releases of OS X that just "worked", the problems produced by Leopard were numerous (one might counter that this is all relative-- four to five issues might not sound as numerous to users of other operating systems, but for OS X, these were a pretty big deal, and kept me from switching for months).

By comparison, Snow Leopard marks a great return to the kind of releases the Mac community came to expect. Yes we still have a month left to wait for its release, and yes there might always be small glitches, but as one long-time Mac user the answer to the question of "is it really all that?" the answer is pretty clear to me at least: "Yes, yes it totally is."
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Launched: Rapid Reporting Employment Chek

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, July 20, 2009 @ 1:02 pm

Pathfinder and Rapid Reporting just launched EmploymentChek, the first employment verification tool that captures employment information from individual employers as well as automated subscription services.

Employment income is usually the primary means for an individual to repay a personal loan. Industry analysts estimate that 64% of all mortgage fraud is income- or identity-related, and that 21% of borrower applications have employment misrepresentations.

EmploymentChek is an addition to Rapid Reporting's existing web portal developed in Ruby on Rails.
Working within Rapid Reporting’s existing Rails environment, Pathfinder’s team delivered this highly-robust, first-of-breed solution in just over four months. EmploymentChek enforces anti-fraud best practices, and delivers extremely detailed reports including: extended public records findings and risk flags, responses to each interview question, interviewer’s subjective impressions, and detailed logging of unsuccessful interview attempts.

During development of EmploymentChek, the mortgage industry went through a period of downturn, which shifted priorities for the application. Pathfinder’s use of the Agile development process, which allows on-the-fly prioritization and reimagination of scope and features, allowed us the flexibility to meet the client’s changing needs in a volatile economic climate.

In addition, EmploymentChek’s service-oriented architecture allows for data vendors to be easily swapped out. This modular framework maximizes flexibility and eliminates the need for retooling the application when switching vendors, which saves time and money.

Take a look at the case study for more details.

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Software Development

What should a good iteration contain

Sharad Jain, Wednesday, July 15, 2009 @ 10:49 am

Yes, by now, we all know that agile works and what an agile project feels like. It has a set of guidelines like individuals over processes, embrace change and working software. It also recommends process tools like scrum, iteration planning, retrospective. And for developers it is manifested as a set of tools like pair-programming, continuous integration, TDD etc.

I have been on about 10 different agile projects in last 2 years. As a hands on developer, the one area that is of special interest to me is what constitutes an iteration, what deliverables and progress metrics it contains? Sure they all contain a set of stories to be delivered and a working software in the end. However, the risk for over promising and under delivering or vice-versa always exists.

The goal is to promise enough (not under) and deliver on it while still taking on a few unknown. Or put it another way, minimize risk somehow. A quick search on internet couldn't deliver a convincing set of traits that would do the same and I believe this area can use some refinement.
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Software Development

Hedge Fund Analytics in Flex

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, June 1, 2009 @ 9:37 am

We just published a case study on a Hedge Fund Analytics application developed in Flex. It's an extensible Flex based platform for real time analysis of hedge fund performance data, with dynamically updating charts, graphs and sophisticated filters for cumulative performance, return distribution, alpha, beta and correlations, commissions and fees, credit and sector exposure.

The system is designed as a modular platform which can consume data services from multiple sources, and can integrate multiple custom components. Custom components were designed to conform to a standard API. Components expose standard flex component properties and events so that properties and method references could be passed. This allowed individual dashboard applications to be built, fed data and customized at run time. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Hedge Fund Analytics

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Software Development

Bugs can’t be estimated

John McCaffrey, Tuesday, May 5, 2009 @ 11:37 pm

In an earlier post about the benefits of Agile and Scrum, I made a statement that bugs by their nature are not the same as normal features, and I wanted to take a moment to try and make my point a little clearer. Bugs and estimation have been a hot topic with us lately, but interestingly we are all working on different projects and actually have a slightly different take on the subject.

My definition of a bug is: A feature that was specified, and you attempted to deliver, but is not working according to your intentions. (ie. "I thought it WAS saving to the database")

Not a bug: A feature or variation that you hadn't intended to create in the first place. ("Oh, I didn't know it was supposed to do that when you clicked the back button")

And with that understanding I say "Bugs can't be estimated"
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Software Development

Pathfinder Launches Beer Hunter, A New Flex + Ruby RIA

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, May 4, 2009 @ 6:51 am

We just launched a new rich internet application for Destinationbeer.com, called Beer Hunter.  It was written in Flex and Ruby on Rails and features mapping and 150 beers from around the world.  We think it's pretty cool, so check it out, and let us know what you think.  One of the things I really like about it is that the design pattern can be applied anywhere you're filtering products geographically and on attributes.  Coffee? Wine? Jewelry? Chocolate? Travel Books? I particularly like the way the beer list visually sorts when you change a filter and the zoom interactions on the map.

There's more information in the case study on the Pathfinder web site, Sasha has written a related post on RubyAMF and Flex from the Flex perspective , and Justin has written one on Rails, AMF and Flex from the Rails perspective.

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Software Development

Touch Screen Kiosk in Adobe Air

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, April 20, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

We recently launched a new Touch Screen Kiosk deployed in both Adobe Air and Flex. Touch Screen Kiosks pose some interesting usability challenges, some of which overlap with those for the iPhone. Take a look at a video demo or read the longer case study on the Pathfinder site.

Touch Screen Kiosk Demo

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Software Development

Adopt a non-techie. Help your business team move faster

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 @ 4:00 am

I've been spending some time with our internal sales and marketing team to hash out some of our goals for the year, and it became quite clear to me that non-developers are on their computers all day long facing some of the same technical challenges we do.

Some of the tasks they have to do:

• "take the data out of the spreadsheet for last quarter and compare it to this quarter"
• "gather the bounced emails from our newsletter posting, and update our list, pulling out duplicates"
• "replace all the names and addresses from our NDA agreement each time it is sent to a new client"
• "slice and dice google ad-words and google analytics data"

So I've resolved to take some time each week to 'Adopt a non-techie', and help them spend less time 'screwing around with the computer' and more time on the most valuable tasks they do.

In the same way that developers need to be as efficient as possible with the tools they use, Continue reading »

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Software Development

Talking about Testing With Chicago Ruby on January 17

Noel Rappin, Monday, January 12, 2009 @ 10:32 am

I'll be doing a talk on Getting Started With Rails Testing and/or related testing topics this Saturday, January 17th at the monthly meeting of ChicagoRuby.org.

It's at 3pm, location and other information is available at their meetup.com site.

Looking forward to it -- see you there!

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Software Development

Category and UI changes on Pathfinder blogs

Brian Dillard, Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 10:50 am

If you read one or more of the Pathfinder blogs in our web interface, you may have noticed some tweaks to our navigation and top-level categories. Our goal in making these changes was to help different audiences drill down to the specific content that interests them. Instead of just a few top-level categories, we now boast around 20, though many posts appear in multiple categories. To subscribe via RSS to any specific category - or to our entire feed - just visit our Feeds page.

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Software Development