Welcome
I received my Software Engineering degree from the University of Alberta in 2008. During this time, I was fortunate to hone my skills in the field of artificial intelligence. Since then, I've had the chance to expand my skills developing web-based business tools. I'm passionate about using computers to solve challenging problems in unique ways. Lately, I've been enjoying web-development because ideas can quickly be turned into reality.
I'm always interested in new and exciting projects, because I believe that it keeps me fresh and up to date. I find that working with one language will often improve my skills in many others. Feel free to contact me for freelance, hire, or contract work.
Recent Blog Posts
Debugging Ruby 1.9
I finally decided it was time to start working with Ruby 1.9 on all new projects. It's flexibility with character encoding was to much of an advantage for this particular project. It was worth any problems that might come up. read more...
Keyword visualization
I discovered a fun tool called Wordle. This tool takes a blog feed or a block of text and visualizes it in a word cloud. This can be very useful for showing you what the keywords and messages on your website actually are. some of the words that come up may surprise you.
Here is the word cloud from the home page of http://forrestzeisler.com
Active Merchant patch for BeanStream
Smibs used BeanStream as a merchant provider for all our billing. The only problem is that there wasn’t currently any Ruby code for interacting with the BeanStream persitant accountsAPI. Most Rails developers will be familiar with the ActiveMerchant plugin. It provides a common interface for connecting to merchant providers. Unfortunately, ActiveMerchants Beanstream support only performs one-time transactions. We needed something which could connect to their “Vaults”. read more...
Smibs on code: Upgrading to Git article written for Smibs Blog
A few days ago, our code repository server froze. Nothing a restart couldn't solve, but this was the fourth time this month. The computer has been running continuously for a couple years, with a few developers constantly committing and pulling changes, uploading files, etc., and it had apparently had enough. read more...