Erik A. Hanson's Weblog

Articles

About Me

I'm a software developer and consultant in San Francisco. I'm also the founder of Lightspun.com, an image manipulation web service.

Recently, I've been developing web apps in Ruby (both Rails and Rack) with lots of Javascript, both on my own and for clients. I've also been developing Palm WebOS and Android mobile apps for clients.

I spent a number of years writing web apps in Java, and I've also done a few random apps such as Blackberry, Flex/AIR/Actionscript, and (long ago) C and C++ Mac and Unix apps.

There's a little more about me on my LinkedIn profile, and a few more blog articles over at Pivotal Labs. I almost never tweet, but you can follow me anyway.

Lightspun.com

Lightspun (www.lightspun.com) is an image processing web service I created. Any website that needs to modify images (creating thumbnails for example) can get set up in a just a couple minutes just by modifying the img tags in their HTML. It can also be called from curl, or any programming language that can make HTTP requests. It is also useful for mobile applications because images can be shrunk or otherwise modified before being downloaded to the device.

JS Dev Tools

JS Dev Tools (www.jsdevtools.com) contains a bunch of links to useful libraries and tools for Javascript developers. See related articles.

Wshlst

Wshlst (www.wshlst.com) is a group-oriented wish list website that I created for my family, partly because no such site existed, and partly because I wanted to write a website completely in Javascript (no HTML, no CSS). It lets you create and share wish lists, and lets you add and discuss items on other peoples' lists (secretly, if you like). See related articles.

BoardsConsult/RotationTracker

BoardsConsult (www.boardsconsult.com) and RotationTracker (www.rotationtracker.com) are a pair of websites that I created with an M.D./Ph.D. friend of mine. BoardsConsult is designed to help medical residents prepare for the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, and RotationTracker is for helping medical schools evaluate and track the progress of the residents in their programs. Unfortunately, we underestimated the amount of work involved in creating a set of high-quality exam review questions, so the sites are not finished. But you're free to play with them in their current state.

Hot

Ruby: Trollop (command-line parser), Pony (simple email sender), Erector (build your UI in code), Haml (if you can't use Erector, this is at least a lot cleaner than ERB).

Javascript: Jasmine (unit testing framework).

Looking For A Job?

I moderate a few completely free jobs mailing lists with RSS feeds and zero spam: XP jobs, Rails jobs and Mac development jobs. Also, my pals at Pivotal Labs often have agile (hard-core agile) Rails, mobile, and Java job openings in San Francisco, New York and Boulder.

Looking For Cheap Web Hosting?

I've been using DreamHost's shared hosting and domain registration for years and I've been very happy with them. They offer tons of disk space and bandwidth and lots of great features.