I keep a text file open as I work, and when I learn something, or fix a bug, I make a note of that in the text file. I call it my journal. It’s pretty low-tech, but text search turns out to be a sufficient way to look up past experiences when I find myself […]
Ruby
I need to clarify my interests. I keep getting calls from recruiters who want to hire me to do Perl or database management. So, I am trying out an experiment in self-analysis by describing my enthusiasms as they relate to specific programming languages. I am currently interested in the web software applications of Ruby, JavaScript, […]
I sure am glad I went to the Bmore on Rails hack night yesterday. I got some invaluable help from Paul Barry hacking together a working template handler for mustache in Rails 3.
At RailsConf, Jeremy McAnally noted that no one had built a new-style Rails generator for the mustache template system. So I’m giving it a try. You can see my progress so far on github. I’ve forked the rails3-generator project started by José Valim and carried on by several contributors, and I’ve added just a little […]
I read an interesting article by Dave Fayram (kirindave) contrasting monkeypatching in Ruby with protocol extension in Clojure. The article compares two of my favorite languages, but I think it was unfortunate to present monkeypatching as the main way to “associate behavior and data in a flexible way.” In fact, Ruby has a number of […]
I was lucky enough to present a talk about asynchronous concurrency in Clojure (and JavaScript and Ruby as it turned out) on May 27th in Reston. Thanks to FGM and Matt and Russ for organizing and hosting the Capital Area Clojure meetup. I have the slides available for review from scribd below. There’s plenty about […]
I gave a talk on Ruby’s Enumerators at the DC Ruby Users Group in August. I’ve posted my slides from the presentation, if you’re interested. Basically, I discovered that enumerators make lazy evaluation easy to implement in Ruby, and applying lazy techniques with enumerators may yield more efficient and elegant code.
I count myself lucky that I can earn a living programming with Ruby and in particular with the Ruby on Rails framework. But every tool, even the best, has a few surprises up its sleeve. Sometimes you get hung up on something quirky, but more often you’re having a problem with a feature—something that’s there […]
Nothing close to a complete review of all the quality talks I heard at RubyNation, the following is just a summary of cool things I learned about while attending. For other resources, and some of my own snarky comments, take a look at the Twitter Channel for the event: #rubynation TupleSpaces and Rinda Luc Castera […]
I’m reading the news on Twitter that a remarkable and wonderful thing has happened in the world of Ruby web developers: Rails and Merb are going to merge. Here are announcement posts from DHH and Yehuda Katz. And here is the requisite humorous site tracking whether the two are combined. As Matz says (by way […]