Blog Posts

Why Should You Care About Cloud Computing?

Article originally written for the Jobber Blog

Jobber is a web app that runs in the "cloud". You may have heard the term before, but why should you care?

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is a term used by a lot of companies that provide software as a service instead of a product. Jobber is an example of a company that operates "in the cloud." Instead of buying servers, we rent computing power by the hour. We also rent storage space by the GB, which we can access over the Internet. This keeps us from having to purchase and maintain our own hardware — an inherently costly and maintenance intensive endeavour. At Jobber we rent our computing power from Amazon (yes the book sellers) through a third party named Heroku.

PDF Magic

I've been using PDFs quite a bit in Jobber lately. From emailing employees their schedules to printing of postage labels for client invoices. However, when we updated to Rails 3.1, I discovered that the Prawnto gem we had been using was broken. A quick look at the network graph on github showed no clear maintainer. There were lots of forks with great features just sitting there, so I decided it was time for somebody to step up to the plate. I gathered all the fragmented forks and merged them into a single repository. I also cleaned up the code, fixed all the tests, and put together some basic documentation. You read more...

Neat Reporting Interface

Just letting people know about a powerful new reporting interface I just finished building into Jobber. You can read all about it in the docs. It provides detailed insight into various aspects of your business. You can see which servies and product make you the most money, how your quote are converting to jobs over time, etc. 

Jobber is Taking Off!

Wow, it's been quite a month. We've recieved our first round of funding, and have relaunch as Jobber. We have a great new website design by Jared Macpherson. We've flushed out the product with a handful of new features, each one deserving it's own post, and given the entire app a new look.

We've also moved to a new office, and highered on the very talented read more...

Starting Fresh

Well it's been a while since I updated my blog. Long enough that when I migrated from slicehost to heroku, it didn't seem worth brining all my old posts along. I plan to start fresh and do a better job of keeping this site up-to-date.