I have been using the term “Viking Coder” for a several years now. Honestly, it was a “equal and opposite” reaction to the rise of the Rockstar Ninja Samurai whatevers in job descriptions. I don’t play a guitar or dress in black PJ’s. I am a big dude, and I like big, simple solutions to problems. And I have a least a little bit of Scandinavian in me.

Some folks asked me what I meant by viking coders. So, with out further gnashing of teeth, here you go.

So you want to build yourself a custom heroku buildpack, and you want to do it the hard way? Look no further, for within lies insanity.

There are a few caveats that you’ll need to understand. The first, is to use google and make sure that some one else has not already embarked on your particular path of insanity. The second is that there are easier ways then this path. You’ll especially want to look at things like Vulcan, which will make parts of this a lot easier.

One of my many failings is a need to understand how things work at their core. So I actually took the time to do this the hard way, and determine exactly what was going on at each step. Hopefully this helps you in some way, and you’ll not have to follow me.

Continue reading ‘Building a custom build pack on Heroku – the HARD WAY’ »

While hacking at my favorite tavern, I noted that I needed to update a gem file. When I tried, gem said that it had succeeded, but there were some odd little errors:

And the gem had not incremented it’s version. Hmm.

I decided to fire up my hotspot and see if that changed anything, and yup. Bingo. Success. Gem updated! Best I can figure they are blocking something that gem needs. So, if I had found this article before that, I would have saved myself 20 minutes of troubleshooting.

One of the cool things about what I do, is that I get exposed to some really interesting paradigms. One of the latest is the 12 factor app. It’s an evolution of some of what I have thought in the past, and a radical departure in others.

I’m going to talk about just one of the concepts right now. It was one of the ones that made the least amount of sense to me, until I started to use it. I’m also going to show a concrete example of how to use it in a production system.

Continue reading ‘Using environment variables for application configuration’ »