Gregory Brown

Biography

Gregory Brown is the original author of Ruby Reports. He has been active in the Ruby community since 2004, and is a member of the new_haven.rb and NYC.rb user groups. He also maintains the support forum for RubyForge. Gregory is a freelance coder who specializes in free software development.

When he is not coding, Greg may be found doing math 'just for fun' or wandering around NYC. You can find him hanging around #ruport on Freenode, if you'd like to stop by and say hello.

Articles

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Ruport: Business Reporting for Ruby
Publish Date: Apr. 8, 2008No one likes developing reporting tools for an application. But without them, many applications are only half-done. Luckily, Ruby has a great reporting infrastructure available to build on, and in this article, you'll learn how to use it. Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby
Publish Date: Jan. 8, 2008It seems like you can't say the word Ruby these days without the word Rails following automatically. But before Rails ever saw the light of day, Ruby was a thriving, robust language. So what can you do without Rails? How about connect a GUI application to a back end web service, using two powerful Ruby frameworks? Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 3)
Publish Date: Sep. 20, 2007Gregory Brown has been testing the heck out of his dots and lines game! In the last portion of his dive into behavior driven development, he looks at custom matchers and introduces us to RCov, a coverage visualizer. Behavior-Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 2)
Publish Date: Aug. 30, 2007Gregory Brown has introduced us to the basic idea of behavior-driven development in his last article. Now, he takes it from abstract to concrete by showing us how to build behavior-driven development into an actual Ruby application. How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord
Publish Date: Jun. 21, 2007When we talk about databases and Ruby, we're almost always talking about ActiveRecord and Rails. But it is quite possible to use ActiveRecord without the Rails scaffolding at all. Gregory Brown shows you how. Rails Testing: Not Just for the Paranoid
Publish Date: Jun. 7, 2007One of the major features of Ruby on Rails is that it provides automatic scaffolding to set up tests. Rails guru Gregory Brown shows us how you can leverage these capabilities to create unit and functional tests for your applications. Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails (Part 2)
Publish Date: May. 10, 2007In the second part of Gregory Brown's in-depth examination of the Rails ActiveRecord Persistence layer, he looks at how to model relationships such as one to many and many to many. This comprehensive introduction to ActiveRecord will let you hit the ground running when you need to integrate a database into Rails. Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails (Part 1)
Publish Date: Apr. 19, 2007ActiveRecord is one of the key elements that makes up Ruby on Rails. It is the crucial link between Rails and the underlying databases that fuel it. Gregory Brown, lead developer of Ruby Reports, begins a two-part exploration of what makes ActiveRecord tick.

Blog

Ruby Mendicant: Hadean Prawn

May 03 2008

Back in March, I announced the Ruby Mendicant project after several readers of this blog encouraged me to pursue the idea. For those who didn't see the follow up details elsewhere, here's the readers digest version: Thanks to 70 donors,... read more

A Ruby WTF

April 28 2008

While working on Prawn, I ran into this (not-so) fun little gotcha: >> 1.to_sym => nil >> 101241.to_sym => nil Anyone cool enough to tell me what this feature is all about? Update: I guess it isn't totally clear what... read more

Gobi: A Ruby Implementation for Go Enthusiasts

April 01 2008

Reposting from the official announcement on RubyTalk Gobi version 1.0.0 has been released! * http://gobi.stonecode.org * http://metametta.blogspot.com * gregory.t.brown@gmail.com I am happy to announce the first release of my new fork of Ruby called Gobi. The goal of Gobi is... read more

Laurent is a champ!

March 16 2008

Though I'm typing this from a Mac right now, I'm hardly a fan boy. I spend a little less than half of my time on OS X, the rest spent on cheap PC hardware and ArchLinux, and honestly, I'm happy... read more

Laurent is a champ!

March 14 2008

The Ruby Mendicant Project

March 11 2008

When I wrote the post I'd love to quit my job! (sort of), I was mainly aiming to start a conversation. Still, enough people took me seriously, and now I can announce that the project is officially under way. I'm... read more

I'd love to quit my job! (sort of)

March 03 2008

UPDATE: Okay kids, now it's 50% fantasy. It's up to you to cover the other 50% by donating and spreading the word, after reading my proposal. Here's hoping for the best! UPDATE: Though my original post was 95% a fantasy,... read more

Do not question assert { 2.0 }

February 14 2008

Interesting: I asked a question on Phlip's last post about whether assert { 2.0 } was really necessary, given that it's mostly just assert_block from Test::Unit. I noticed this question disappeared from the post, because I guess it was offensive... read more

The Ruby Community Is Dead, Long Live Ruby Communities

February 05 2008

The title of this post is the title of a talk I'll be giving at NYC Ruby on February 12th. Aside from blatent self promotion, I'm actually posting in search of opinions and thoughts to incorporate into this discussion, so... read more

Ruby Conferences vs. Go Tournaments

January 22 2008

When I first got involved in free software development, I didn’t really know why I was doing it. It just seemed reasonably fun and challenging, which was enough to let it steal up every spare minute of my time in the form of a not-so-mini obsession. I didn’t so much… read more

Zed's So #{@expletive} Awesome

January 01 2008

If you don’t mind ‘bad’ language and a little bit of hate, go check out Zed Shaw’s rant,Rails is a Ghetto. I’m not quite sure what his intent was with the article, I’m not sure that even matters. What I know is that it has shock value, it made me laugh,… read more

Open Source, Books, and Open Source Books

December 21 2007

Some of you may know that I’ve been working on The Ruport Book, a free-content book about Ruby Reports. Mike Milner and I have really learned through trial by fire some of the pros and cons of DIY technical publishing in the last few months. I’d like to share some… read more

Real Productivity

November 08 2007

The most important thing I’ve picked up with each RubyConf I’ve attended is a new outlook on my work. Each year the talks invite people to have their minds bent a bit, both technically and philosophically. Though I didn’t take notes and my attention span is usually too low to… read more

Structs on Steroids

November 03 2007

I am a big fan of Ruby’s Struct class. It makes it trivial to build container objects, and then later expand them into full blown classes when needed. If you’ve not worked with them before, here’s an example: Person = Struct.new(:first_name,:last_name,:email) joe = Person.new joe.first_name = "Joe" joe.last_name = "Loop" joe.email = "joeloop@blah.com" class… read more

Rails is the new Hitler

September 24 2007

Anyone else think that Godwin’s Law should be amended to include Rails? Just a thought. read more