http://www.chrisfierer.com Development, Design and more Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:19:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently had a birthday and my amazing and beautiful wife pulled together the family for a truly special birthday gift. I flew down to Atlanta for the weekend, spent time with family and went flying with my best friend Matt Conway. Matt is the Chief Instructor for ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/09/28/gone-flying/ I am amazed by Twitter. A simple question asking "What are you doing?" and it has become wildly popular. What I think is even more interesting are the great web apps that have showed up around the web utilizing it's API. Some of these are really cool ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/08/21/twitter-lets-build-something/ Southwest airlines has officially won me over for all of my air travel needs (minus flying to Atlanta). I have flown many different airlines over my life and Southwest is the first to have departed and arrived on time, twice. Both flights were great and the way they ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/08/21/thank-you-southwest/ Blown away by this moment at Crosspointe. The capacity for a community to pull together, give above and beyond, and make a difference that will affect generations to come. This is something amazing to be a part of. Six days, $405,802.97, and a place that will be ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/06/16/40580297/ I think it's important to focus your time and resources in such a way that you can make the biggest impact/difference. Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses across all activities of life. Perhaps as a developer/designer, it means managing 2 projects at a time instead of ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/06/01/focused-impact/ Introducing our nephew Harrison Case Dooley!  Harrison was born May 19th at 7:37am weighing in at 6 pounds, 13.5 ounces, along with a full head of hair.  My sister Lauren and her husband Brett are proud parents and have a healthy son.  We are all very excited and thank you ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/05/19/harrison-case-dooley/ My brother Kevin passed away last weekend. I wanted to write something brief about him since he was a huge part of my life. Kevin was my stepbrother, but I never thought of him this way. He was and always will be my brother. He had one of ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/04/26/my-brother-kevin-kirkpatrick-jr/ When using IBATIS, use $parameter$ to inject literals in your sql maps. For instance, if you have a sql query that injects a comma separated list of ids, using #parameter# will put quotes in the sql, causing an error if you were using the "in" operator. Using ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/04/26/ibatis-inserting-literals-removing-quotes-from-your-sql/ Usability is beautiful. I think it shines when the interface is simple. Simple to the point that users get it when they see it (an Ah-Ha moment), and the flow comes naturally. That simplicity comes with a focus on understanding your user and the problems they want ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/03/30/focused-simplicity/ I attended Refresh the Triangle for the first time last Thursday at iContact in Durham.  Rob Goodlatte gave a great talk on "Justifying Design".  He made some good points about what to consider when designing for the web.  There were two points that he made that I certainly agree with ... http://www.chrisfierer.com/2008/03/04/recap-refresh-the-triangle-justifying-design/