cwash into software

The first Ruby I looked at was actually back in 2002, well before Rails, during college as part of a group project in a programming languages course. At the time, most of the information my team could find on it was in Japanese. I looked at Rails initially in 2005 and found some things I thought were lacking in the framework.  I never pursued it much more than that because I didn’t feel like paying the early adopter tax. It had some growing up to do. But seeing as how I recently have been working with Prototype a lot, which aims to almost turn Javascript into Ruby, (a few plugins will get you even closer…) I’ve found a renewed interest in Ruby. I figured I’d take a closer look at what is going on in Ruby-land and to that end, I drove down to RubyRX in Durham, NC last week.

Career 2.0

Jared Richardson recently published a new book based on some ideas he’s been floating around in talks for a while. Jared stopped in at the Richmond JUG recently to give a talk and we were all really intrigued and entertained with his presentation. I was fortunate to pick up a copy of Career 2.0 while I was at RubyRX and it’s a great handbook for investing in your knowledge portfolio through sharing knowledge. There are a lot of useful tips on how to improve your writing, speaking and networking skills. Take a look at the book’s blog for more info.

Dr. Nil

I was interested in seeing Nathaniel Talbot’s talks. I had already seen his talk The Fear of Programming in video, which he has refined a bit and created an alter-ego “Dr. Nil” (Phil?) by asking developers to talk about their feelings/emotions and how that influences how you think and act. It was a very interesting talk. I also saw his talk Five Skills Every Freelancer Should Have and he’s floated the idea of spinning that off into a book. Keep an eye out for it!

HAML and SASS

These technologies were mentioned in a few different talks I attended and I found them interesting because what I’ve never liked about Rails is that its view templates had code snippets in them. This leads to tag soup and has been discouraged in JSP and other areas for a while now. I’ll blog more on this in another post. But  HAML and SASS take an interesting approach. I have my doubts about whether or not it will gain the traction needed to make “pretty” templates a bigger issue. From what I hear, (and feel free to correct me if I am wrong) it seems some of the more prominent voices out there aren’t sold on it yet and have strong feelings about the whole idea.

Build Up Vs. Build Down

I write here often about what I’ve been doing with Seam and Java EE. Seam’s success has come from the philosophy that a developer’s job will be easier if there is a simple interface to a deeply integrated set of powerful frameworks. Grails has a similar philosophy. A common thread in talks I attended at RubyRX was the idea of building down instead. Seeing all of the neat tricks you can do with metaprogramming, this makes a lot of sense for Ruby and many frameworks in the Ruby world take advantage of this idea. There are some very interesting implications with these two paradigms and how they affect code reuse. But that’s another blog post…

It’s All Been Done Before…

Rick DeNatale gave a very interesting talk on the history of dynamic-typed languages and their parallel evolution along with static-typed languages. I always find talks about how languages have evolved to be fascinating, especially if you consider there are a number of problems that we just keep solving over and over again every 20 years. There is wisdom gained in knowing how we got to the present, and I’d like to think these kinds of discussions leave you with insights about where we’ll go from here.

Update: Sysinternals puts out some great developer friendly tools. They come in handy!
Update #2: I’ve made the switch to using Launchy over DOMercury.

Working on Windows XP is unavoidable at my job. While it’s not my favorite environment, I’ve found a decent baseline of software tools to augment the barebones OS that can get me to a place where it isn’t that bad. Note, I’m not including any tools for doing off-development related things, anything development related that is on the web or any cool plugins for any of these programs.

Here is what I need, in roughly the order I download them: (continue reading…)

I can’t believe it’s already December! I came across 24ways last year and thought it was a neat concept: an ‘advent calendar for web geeks’ – take a look! They had a pretty good variety last year and I’m expecting some good things this year.

On Tim Bray’s recommendation, I just picked up a new Apple Wireless Keyboard:

So far, it seems like a good choice.  As mentioned in Tim’s post, I notice my typing speed has dramatically increased immediately, when compared to the built in keyboard, or the stock Dell keyboards I’ve been typing on when not at my Mac recently.

I didn’t think the num pad warranted the extra space it’ll take up when I carry it around with me.  The super big command key doesn’t concern me quite as much, because I’ve gotten used to slipping my left thumb down to hit it from hovering over the spacebar, and it’s easier/more natural to do that on this keyboard compared to the one built into the MBP.

And this all goes without saying that the wireless features are a big plus.  Whenever you sit down to do something, having to plug in an extra wire is nothing short of a pain in the ass (not to mention taking up valuable port space on my precious laptop).

So far I’m pretty happy with the purchase.  If my opinion changes, I’ll let you know, but the spot judgement is that it’s exactly what I was expecting.

I think it’s important to support and give back to products and efforts that are high quality and enhance your productivity, happiness, or everyday life.  A List Apart, a web published magazine “for people who make websites” was the first feed I remember adding to my feed reader.  It definitely falls into this “need to give back” category for me.  Their articles have a web design/development slant, and are written in a consistent, succinct, repeatable fashion.  It’s a successful site, and I applaud its efforts.

If you didn’t know about ALA, well now you know.  If you do know about them, give something back by participating in their survey.

Reinstalled WordPress. I’ve been a little frustrated with other blog efforts that I’ve been roped into in the past few years and have decided that this is as good a place as any to just get stuff written down. And there’s really no good reason not to – so here’goes!