Google Summer of Code

March 21 2007

RubyCentral is once again a Mentoring Organization for the Google Summer of Code. While we have a very strong pool of mentoring candidates, we’d love to see more student/project applications. Applying as a student is pretty easy, all you need to do is go here and follow the directions. If you’ve… read more

MountainWest RubyConf 2007

February 13 2007

This year’s first regional Ruby conference, the MountainWest RubyConf will be held March 16th and 17th in Salt Lake City, UT. It is accepting registrations until Feb 23rd. While it might be small in its geographical reach, it looks like a very big conference in almost every other way. The keynote… read more

Lots of Rubies, All Playing Nicely Together

January 19 2007

I’ve written before about how cool it is to see the JRuby and rubinius guys working together (Nick Sieger also posted a piece about it). (It can be mind-bending to follow a discussion across multiple irc channels though.) I’m even more encouraged to see that Kevin Tew (the Cardinal hacker)… read more

The ruby-talk Gateway; a Series of Posts from James Gray

December 07 2006

James E. Gray has been busily posting a series of articles about the ruby-talk to comp.lang.ruby gateway (The mail to news portion is discussed here). Given the impact that these have on the community, I’d say they should be required reading. Go take a look at them now, I’ll wait. Done… read more

Programmer Deathmatch in Utah Draws Interest (And a New Recruit)

November 22 2006

It was in October that I first started seeing the billboard on my way to work. “Programmer Deathmatch! $10,000 grand prize!”, it screamed at me as I drove by. Running down the side was a list of languages; C++, Java, Lisp (what was that doing there?), Ruby (What!?). It’s a… read more

Robert Glass, DSLs, and Ruby

October 09 2006

A little while ago, I interviewed Robert Glass and something he said struck a chord. I do think, however, that in the ancient past, when COBOL and Fortran (which are the original domain-specific languages) were in full flower, we understood the role of languages vs. applications better. You may wonder… read more

Riffing on Obie

October 05 2006

Obie Fernandez posted a nice little overview of the JAOO “Future of Programming Panel”, in which he highlighted the panels answers to the questions: Will (the) Ruby (community) in 2016 look and feel like Java in 2006? How can Ruby avoid the same fate as Smalltalk? The answers were interesting, but… read more

Interviewing the Audience

October 05 2006

Sometimes, an interview just doesn’t go as planned. I throw out a lot of questions and answers from the interviews I do, either because the answers are better combined or they just don’t fit with the rest of the interview. Occassionally, some of my favorite questions don’t make the cut.… read more

Reading Ola Bini

September 18 2006

I’ve been reading Ola Bini’s blog recently, and I’m really impressed with what I’m seeing there. Over the last three days, he’s managed four solid posts, including two that really stood out to me. MetaProgramming Refactoring is a great piece on the refactorings that could be cataloged around Metaprogramming. He uses… read more

Spotlight On Glark

September 04 2006

One of the ideas that came up on the Ruby web page redesign list was a rotating set of application and library spotlights. The idea didn’t take root, but Martin DeMello produced this spotlight on glark, which I’m posting here with his permission. I’ve often joked that the ruby community seems… read more

Interviewing Gregory Brown

August 31 2006

Gregory is a free software developer from Connecticut. He is currently an undergraduate student at the University of New Haven pursuing a double major in Computer Science / Mathematics. His primary focus has been working on Ruby Reports for the last year. This summer, Gregory participated in Google Summer of… read more

RubyConf*MI in review

August 28 2006

This weekend, I flew out to Grand Rapids, Michigan for the first ever RubyConf*MI — one of the first regional Ruby Conferences (David Alan Black reminded me that San Diego held one earlier this year). Other than what might have been the worst flight schedule in my long history of… read more

Interviewing the team behind RubyConf*MI

August 16 2006

Brandon Keepers, Mark Van Holstyn, Zach Dennis, and Craig Demyanovich have been working on RubyConf*MI, a regional Ruby conference in Michigan for a while now. Now that they’ve announced it publicly (and opened up the registration — only $20 for a full day), I wanted to talk to them about… read more

Profiling Ruby code with ruby-prof

August 15 2006

Ever since I saw Charlie Savage’s blog post about ruby-prof 0.4.0, I’ve been thinking about how great it was to see faster and better profiling tools (how cool are cross-referenced call graphs?). Now that I’m writing up my talk for RubyConf*MI , I’ve been looking a little bit deeper. For… read more

Creating C extensions in Ruby, *really* fast

August 01 2006

First, there were the threads about rewriting Ruby apps in C, then I wrote a pair of follow up posts (here and here). These got picked up by an article over on InfoQ, which also pointed to How to Create a Ruby Extension in 5 Minutes. Finally, zenspider picked that… read more