I recently teamed up with a great designer by the name of Ray Hernandez to build a new product that bills itself as “a platform for private, long-form, one-on-one communication.” In a way, it’s a rejection of the idea that we’re only supposed to speak to each other in 140 characters that are only visible for 10 seconds.

It’s bringing the old pen pal tradition into the 21st century. Say hello to Reeed.co.

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As part of The Democratic Travelers I’m working on the ability to show which states Laura and I have been to. We’re currently tracking that information in the database, but the only place it shows up on the front-end is in a simple numerical count, such as “we’ve been to 39 states…”

We get asked a lot which states we’ve been to and which one’s we have left to tackle, so I thought it’d be great to show a mini map to answer those questions quickly. I stumbled across Stately, a great little symbol font that allows you to create a customizable, scalable map of the United States with minimal mark up.

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Sometimes, you just need to add tagging to a form on your website. At work, we (Freddy and I) recently had to implement some tagging for fields that had a pre-defined list of options to choose from. Taking advantage of Rails 4.x’s and PostgreSQL’s native support for array-type columns, we were able to avoid the hassle of extra models, join tables, foreign keys, etc. We then used Chosen.js to make the UI clean and dead-simple.

Here’s how it all came together.

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