Author Archives: Ryan Svihla

About Ryan Svihla

I consider myself a full stack polyglot, and I have been writing a lot of JS and Ruby as of late. Currently, I am an independent contractor and owner of Foundational Development. I try to make all of non-work code available on github.com

An Evernote backed Journal using Vim/Emacs

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Ryan Svihla

I journal quite a bit and my holy grail has been using my favorite text editor (Vim or Vim bindings) with Evernote to store the everything in a smart searchable format. Today I stumbled onto a neat little tool that makes … Continue reading →

Posted in Evernote, Vim | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Ruth’s Story

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Ryan Svihla

Ruth Ann Svihla came into this world screaming and angry on October 30 2011 at 6:57 am. She was and has always been a beautiful, intelligent child that brought us a great deal of joy, but she was born with … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

Rail 3.1 CI setup with Jenkins, Test Unit & SimpleCov on OS X Lion.

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Ryan Svihla

I recently had to setup a build server for some rails work I’m doing. Still wanting to support my other projects I setup Jenkins. I ran into several issues. Running Jenkins as a hidden user First I noticed that jenkins … Continue reading →

Posted in CI, Rails | Comments Off

The difficult definition of professional software development

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Ryan Svihla

Here are some of the contradictory phrases (and a few paraphrases) I’ve overheard used to define what is “good” and “bad” code. Code should always be well commented Maintainable code has unit tests and well named methods therefore needs little … Continue reading →

Posted in Craftsmanship | 10 Comments

Java IoC containers and classpath scanning (or what I’ve been looking for from .NET for months)

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

Frustrated with the typical way I saw IoC used in Java where every example I found involved thousands of lines of XML and/or Java code to configure Java beans or components.  This is very different than IoC typically used in … Continue reading →

Posted in IoC, Java, Spring | 2 Comments

Anti-Pattern: Too much of your application is about interacting with external resources

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

Firstly, what am I talking about? Applications that meet some of the following descriptions: Stored procedures with a fair amount of conditional logic or complicated business rules buried in a sub-query (some would argue sprocs at all). Web pages with … Continue reading →

Posted in Anti-Patterns | Comments Off

Project Management in Java: A Confused .NET Developer’s Perspective

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

When I was first introduced to workplace Java the amount of ways one could define a project appeared to be restrictive, confusing and a point of frequent friction. While those things may all be true, it’s a great deal better … Continue reading →

Posted in Ivy, Java, Maven, MSBuild | 7 Comments

MySQL 5 Performance Tuning Toolkit

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

Recently we’d played with table partitioning and because of the limitations of it and some decisions we’d made a very long time ago we ended up spending a couple of days tracking down hotspots. In the process I picked up … Continue reading →

Posted in MySQL | Comments Off

Java Dependency Management with Apache Ivy

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

Not wanting to ditch your already built well working ant scripts for the plugin-centric view of Maven, especially if your project structure doesn’t line up quite right with Maven’s point of view? Enter Apache Ivy which like Maven can automatically … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Hibernate Connection Pooling: why isn’t the default one for production?

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Ryan Svihla

Hibernate unlike NHibernate comes with a variety of connection pooling options. The three primary ones of which I’m aware are Proxool, Apache DBCP, and c3p0 . I myself have only so far used c3p0 and it works quite well having … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off