FlyoverWorks Blog

So, it's been a while... A bunch of you have asked why I haven't posted my site. I'd been meaning to update a few things that I wasn't thrilled about with my final project. But life happened, and I haven't been able to fix the issues. So here's what I'm going to do... DISCLAIMER: It probably looks like crap in IE browsers. It is not responsive on mobile, the way I wanted it to be, so don't look at it on your phones. Check it out in Chrome or Safari at a standard browser
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FlyoverWorks is excited to announce the release of Storytime 2.0! We've taken our learnings from the original version of Storytime and built some terrific new features that we're proud to share with the Rails community.1. Combined CMS, Blog, & Admin Features In most applications that we build for clients, we end up needing
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I recently gave a talk at 1871 titled Working with Developers as a Non-Technical Person.Below is an abstract of the talk, which will appear again at 1871 in the future. I also wanted to make the slides available, which can be found here.
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Eventually over a couple of beers, and meetings, we came up with this idea that we needed to be more mobile as an industry, to get people more interested in plants and gardening in general. We came up with a couple of ideas that really didn’t pan out, and eventually we said, “alright, what else is there? How else can we reach young gardeners without directly selling to them?”
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In preparation for the final few episodes of Mad Men starting up on April 5th, I’ve been watching the first part of season 7 again as a refresher to where the season left off, and I was reminded of yet another scene that really hit home for me...
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I've had parts of this post written for weeks and haven't been able to tackle it. I think the main reason is that I've been pretty damn frustrated with my class projects.
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The Flyover Series is a collection of interviews with founders and key contributors of Chicago-based tech companies. Our goal is to help illuminate some of the terrific people and work in the Chicago technology scene.This interview is with David Suwinski, founder Carzell
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I'm back with an update on my 2nd and 3rd weeks of front-end development class. Have you been doing nothing else in your life but waiting for this update? I thought so!
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Here at FlyoverWorks we're excited to announce the release of Storytime v1.1! For anyone unfamiliar with Storytime, it's a Rails 4.0+ CMS and blogging engine, built with a primary focus on content.
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This year’s nominees are heavily sprinkled with low-budget independent films, with terrific potential for cozy Friday nights.
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My first week of General Assembly's HTML/CSS classes are complete and I've lived to tell about it. In fact, it was fun.
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The Flyover Series is a collection of interviews with founders and key contributors of Chicago-based tech companies. Our goal is to help illuminate some of the terrific people and work in the Chicago technology scene. This interview is with John Cifelli, founder of Gigscout.
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All weekend I have been filled with feelings I have not experienced in years. A mix of excitement, nervousness and the anticipation of making the first mark in a brand new notebook. Tomorrow, I’m going back to school, and learning front end development.
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The Flyover Series is a collection of interviews with founders and key contributors of Chicago-based tech companies. Our goal is to help illuminate some of the terrific people and work in the Chicago technology scene. This interview is with Kyle Joseph, executive director and founder of Foodseum.
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What is SparkReel? Adam: SparkReel helps brands harness user-generated content, more specifically photo and video content.
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The Flyover Series is a collection of interviews with founders and key contributors of Chicago-based tech companies. Our goal is to help illuminate some of the terrific people and work in the Chicago technology scene. This interview is with Jill Salzman, founder of The Founding Moms.
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...While we love working with and are inspired by these corporate "rebels," the reality is that an organization, to be successful in fulfilling their mission, needs people to play many different parts. It needs its leaders, its doers, its visionaries, and even its contrarians. People who can define a direction and others to get them there and challenge the status quo every step of the way...
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In almost every web app project that we do, we end up needing to create some informational pages, such as a home page, features page, or an FAQ. Deciding where and how to build these pages always seems to be a double edged sword. One option is to build them directly into the Rails app. Doing it this way allows us to develop the page in our local development environment, making it faster to develop and ensuring the code is tracked in version control. But it presents a major downside in that...
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What is Hooray Learning? Stacy: Horray Learning is start-up here in Chicago that is producing entertaining, empowering, and educational online portals. Our first product coming to market is Hooray Writing, which is an online creative writing experience for teachers, parents, and students grades 1-12. It is currently being piloted with 1,100 students around the Chicago area.
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In the 1964 trial Jacobellis v. Ohio, Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart coined the famous phrase "I know it when I see it" to describe pornography. The same could be said of someone you'd describe as an "animal," which is a good way to characterize someone with tenacity. Someone who fits the "animal" persona get's after it, day after day, cranking through tough problems. The label could also fit someone who consistently and voraciously consumes and learns new things.
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In almost every app that we build at FlyoverWorks, there ends up being a home page that provides an introduction to the product, its features, and its goals. This is a good example of a page that is content heavy, but is usually fairly complex in HTML structure and CSS styling. Typically, we waver back and forth between building this page directly into the app and building it in the CMS. Building it into the app makes sense because it affords us the speed benefits of developing locally...
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For the past several years, the teams at Federis Group and Inkling have been devising, designing, and developing software products. We've had an extremely close working relationship, building products together and sharing best practices, helping hands, and even office space. While we shared a lot, our company-building efforts were separate, parallel efforts.
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