Dave Brace

Announcing Stew Share

The past few months I’ve been working on a project in my free time addressing a personal need: the ability to privately share recipes with friends and family.

There are a lot of recipe websites out there already, but none of them seem to focus on sharing recipes within social circles, and none offer the ability to share recipes privately.

I therefore decided to build Stew Share. It is a work in progress, but all of the basic functionality is available, including creating recipes and sharing them with groups of friends.

Anyone can join and share public recipes and you can subscribe to unlock the ability to create private recipes. Feedback is welcome and much appreciated.

Please check it out and let me know what you think!

www.stewshare.com

What would the greatest technological leap you’d have to explain to someone who time traveled from the 1950’s?

cdixon:

I possess a device in my pocket that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.

I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.

via

(via parislemon)

parislemon:

stoweboyd:

Burglars break into Microsoft campus, steal iPads, but ‘no Microsoft products were reported stolen’ (via 9to5 Mac)

Story of our time.

Hilarious.

"Betting completely on HTML5 is one of the, if not THE biggest strategic mistake we’ve made."

Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt

Really interesting to see the failure of HTML5 on mobile for Facebook.  HTML5 is definitely the future… but for now native is the way to go for the best user experience.

(Source: chartier, via parislemon)

parislemon:

artpixie:

Sigils of Westeros by Darren Crescenzi

via Design Crush

Created by a Nike designer in his spare time. Sadly, already sold out.

Winter is coming.

bryan:

This is a really good idea.

(Source: bryan)

Cash Back Credit Cards + Savings Accounts

This post is a slightly different from the normal.  My fiance recently graduated from graduate school and started work.  I have been helping her reorganize her financing as she transitions from being a student to the workforce.  In the process, I readdressed my finances, and I wanted to share what credit cards and bank accounts appear to offer the best deals currently.

When it comes to credit card rewards, I prefer cash back for a variety of reasons.  Cash back gives you the most flexibility as to how you spend rewards.  I do travel a decent amount, however I do not think there is a huge benefit in airline miles rewards due to black out dates, etc.  I’d rather have the cash back to buy plane tickets according to what fits my schedule best, etc.  I avoid traditional rewards programs because of the limited amount of options of goods to purchase.

That being said, I’m always keeping an eye out for the best cash back rewards programs.  After doing a bunch of research last week, I discovered the following cards appear to offer the best deals:

1. American Express Blue Cash Everyday - 3% back on groceries, 2% on gas and department stores and 1% on everything else with no limit.
2. Chase Freedom - 1% unlimited rewards on everything and rotating 5% cashback rewards categories each quarter up to $1,500 spending.  Current quarter categories include dining, department stores and charity.
3. Capital One Cash Rewards - 1% unlimited rewards with a 50% bonus every year, for an effective rate of 1.5%.

With these three credit cards, you can get 3% back on groceries, 2% back on department stores (including Amazon.com supposedly), 5% cash back on random categories every quarter and 1.5% cash back everywhere else.  As far as I was able to tell, these are currently the best deals out there for how I spend my money currently.  I do not own a car so I avoided credit cards that give bonuses for gas spending which is a common bonus rewards category.  Obviously everybody’s spending trends vary, so you may find another credit card that offers bonus categories that better work for you.  Also, I try to pay off my credit cards every month so that I don’t have to worry about APR differences, etc.

In regards to online savings accounts, ING Direct appears to still offer competitive rates and I love their web interface compared to any other bank.  I believe the current interest rate they offer is 1%.  This rate is much higher compared to what brick and mortar banks offer in savings accounts from what I’ve seen.  The only caveat is that transfers can take 2-5 days to clear and you’re limited to five withdrawals a month (which from what I understand is a standard for savings accounts.)

I’m always open to suggestions, so if anyone has any recommendations let me know!

Learning a new technical language and platform

My whole career as a professional developer has been centered around ASP.Net and the Microsoft way of doing web development.  I decided recently that I wanted to learn about the various other options out there for web development and why they are popular.

From what I was able to learn via Google, the most popular alternatives to ASP.Net  are PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python / Django and node.js.  I decided to checkout Ruby on Rails due to the highly active community surrounded around the language and framework.

I picked up Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails tutorial and so far I’m about half way through the tutorial.  I have been really impressed with the tooling available for Ruby on Rails and the ease of rapid development.  I’m also really enjoying the focus on test driven development that the ruby on rails community emphasizes.

More importantly, I’ve begun to learn other patterns and methods of accomplishing tasks you do on a daily basis as a web developer.  This has proved invaluable, and I definitely recommend that all developers try to pick up a new language or framework.  Even if you decide you don’t like the new framework, I think you’ll learn something that will help you grow as a developer.

Best Mac Apps?

After reading various reviews, I finally decided to go ahead and order a new MacBook Air 13”.  This is going to be my first personally owned Mac, and I am excited to give OSX a try as my full time operating system.  I’ve been researching the best apps to install on my new laptop, and I am looking for recommendations.

So far, the only app I think I’m definitely going to give a try is BBEdit to use for coding, etc.  TextMate appears to be more popular, but it has not received a major update in a while.  I might reconsider if and when version 2.0 comes out, but for the time being I am going to start with BBEdit 10.

I’ll probably install TweetDeck, as that is the client I use on my iPhone currently.  I’ve used Adium for chat in the best, but I believe iChat in Lion supports non-Apple IM protocols, so I might pass on installing that for the time being.

Another question I have is whether to use VMWare or Parallels for running instances of Windows.  I am a professional .Net developer, so I cannot completely give up Windows.  Alternatively, I could just use BootCamp.

What other essential Mac apps am I missing?