My Info

Email me at andre {at} earthcode {dot} com.

Or check out my professional background at linked in (Andre Lewis).

I am located in San Francisco, CA.

My People

I am a partner at Highgroove Studios. We are like ninjas, but better conversationalists. Drop me a line if you have a project proposal / training need / bootstrap or consultation request.

My Book

Google Maps with Rails and Ajax: from Novice to Professional
Published with Apress, 2007.

My Recent Talks and Presentations

5/19/2007: RailsConf 2007: The Business of Rails

Advice on consulting and contracting with Ruby on Rails.

1/18/2007: Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails: RESTful Routing Basics (slides)

A presentation on RESTful routing and resources in Rails 1.2. I stepped through some code to show how to get started with the scaffold_resource generator, set up nested resources using REST, use the new named routes, and use respond_to to return information in different formats (HTML/XML/JS/JSON). I also talked about the motivations behind RESTful design, and concrete advantages to embracing REST. More information is in the slides (link above), and in my nested CRUD resources blog post.

1/9/2007: Ruby Meetup in San Francisco: three useful patterns for RMagick (code)

A quick talk to demonstrate how easy it is to use RMagick for dynamic server-side graphics generation. I demonstrated and showed code for three patterns I have found useful: image generation from scratch within a Rails action; "image generate and cache" (caching the generated image on the file system); and loading and manipulating an existing image within a Rails action.

12/7/06: SDForum at Google in Mountain View: Ruby and Google Maps (slides)

In this talk I went into some depth on two aspects of working with Google Maps on Rails. First, I demonstrated how to create overlays in order to show dense and varied information on a map. Second, I discussed the process of geocoding, and explained how it is possible to build your own geocoder from free, publicly available data. I demonstrated a San Francisco-based geocoder I had running on my own laptop, and discussed the data import, interpolation, and querying processes necessary to implement the geocoder.

10/21/06: RubyConf in Denver: GZoom Lightnig Talk

This was a brief presentation and demo on my open-source GZoom custom maps control.

7/11/06: Ruby Meetup in San Francisco (slides)

In this presentation, I talked about my experience using the jQuery JavaScript library to implement a site in Rails, and contrasted jQuery to Prototype/Scriptaculous. I briefly discussed a very basic Google Maps integration as well. The technical content of the talk was wrapped in the context of the SF Wireless website I had recently implemented in Rails (the site is now at http://hotspotr.com)