This summer I’ve been interning at SimpleRelevance as a front end engineer. SimpleRelevance is a recommendation engine that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to enhance the digital marketing of other companies. Aside from mobile responsiveness, snappy AJAX forms, and some WordPress database migrations, one of my bigger projects has been rebuilding the website dashboard that presents key data to clients regarding how SimpleRelevance’s personalized marketing is generating more revenue and customer activity for clients.

Many developers have heard of services like forwardhq to share their localhost with collaborators or for mobile testing. Yet many of them don’t even know that Pow, a Rack server for OS X, allows you to do that for free. Setting it up is so simple, and you can just symlink your Rails directories to ~/.pow For local development, you simply head to http://myapp.dev This is good for testing apps locally, as you don’t even have to start the Rails server for your app.

Tired of Apple’s constraints on all of its hardware? Have $30 dollars to spare? If so, you may want to consider buying yourself a shiny new Raspberry Pi and installing Raspbmc to set up your own Apple TV. Here’s what you need to get started: Raspberry Pi w/ 4 GB minimum SD card HDMI Cable Ethernet Connection (optional but recommended) Simply connect the SD Card, install the highly configurable OS, and load it onto your Raspberry Pi for wireless streaming among all of your iOS devices.

Linux is a wonderful operating system, full of features for everyone to tinker with. With a Linux server, you are essentially expanding these features into your intranet (yes intranet), to wirelessly stream to every device in your home, to host web servers, and more. Here’s how I set mine up: Download and install a Linux distro. I picked Ubuntu (12.04 at the time) for its ease of installation, but you can just as easily pick Fedora, Debian, or go for a pure command line approach with a distro such as Gentoo.