I'm Darren, I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and web guru, I live in Parksville/Qualicum Beach and this is my website

Last year I co-founded a new company called Green Bug Technology Group with a partner for the same area as me. My partner had an idea and I had the skills so we both started chipping away at a web application in our spare time that would give the aviation industry a powerful tool for both sellers and buyers of aircraft and parts. About a month ago we finally released it to the aviation public and have been seeing great results and getting tons of feed back. It’s been a long haul and were pretty proud of what it has become… and what it ‘will’ become. It beats the heck out of all the competition so hopefully, someday soon, it will become my full time job.

It’s a Ruby on Rails subscription based web application, that uses sphinx and thinking-sphinx for full text searching, memcached for caching all that data, some sweet gems like delayed_job and paperclip to delay image uploading and processing to Amazon s3, a full automated credit card subscription billing system and a ton of other goodies.

Bam: http://aircraftsalesandparts.net

Truglaze.com is a website design I recently did for a client. Built with Ruby on Rails, it consists of a full custom CMS with a Flash Application to showcase all his selected photos from a portfolio component.

Just the other day I was browsing through some railscasts from Ryan Bates and noticed he was starting his server with “ss”. It made me pissed that I hadn’t thought of doing that before, I guess because I was so comfortable cd ~/Sites/appname and script/server. So I first wrote some aliases like Ryan’s “ss”, but then thought huh, this could be better… Google to the rescue and I found this code for script/server and then that inspired me to write this code for mate appname. Pretty quick to open and boot apps!

I saw this in a Rails video on Bala Paranj’s website http://rubyplus.org and thought is was a pretty cool way to display different flash messages throughout your app.

<% flash.each do |key, value| -%>
? <div id="notice_<%= key %>"><%= value %></div>
 <% end -%>

Then you can do different flash objects like this:

flash[:success] = "message here"
flash[:error] = "message here"

Then just style the messages with some css and you’ve got a notice div displaying error and success messages with less effort!

I just launched my girlfriends hair salon website Floasis Hair Salon. Looks preeetty good so far even in all browsers. It’s a Ruby on Rails site of course. Nothing too crazy, just a simple interface that is easy to find what your looking for. How all sites should be.