One of the rather unique features of the Fortress1 programming language is that it has builtin support for Unicode operators. For example, instead of using “==” you would use U+2261. After reading the spec, and a recent thread on ruby-core, I’ve been wondering something . Are language designers too limited in their decisions about syntax because of the limitations of the QWERTY2 keyboard?
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 with both (each for different reasons)
Still, Apple definitely got some things right, and not the least of which was hiring Laurent Sansonetti. He’s the guy who’s been working on cool projects such as RubyCocoa and RubyOSA, and now has just released MacRuby.
MacRuby sounds cool:
MacRuby is a version of Ruby that runs on top of Objective-C. More precisely, MacRuby is currently a port of the Ruby 1.9 implementation for the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector.
Though I’m not actively doing Mac specific Ruby development, that doesn’t mean I can’t extend thanks to a very cool hacker who has been dropping cool free software projects on our community like it was his job…. oh wait… it is. :)
Thanks Laurent for your contributions! You’re one of the reasons why the Ruby community rocks.
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, I’ve received some funding offers that have brought it down to 75% fantasy. I will be documenting any planning I’m doing towards via a wiki called RubyMendicant. If you’d like to follow this on the bleeding edge, keep an eye out on that wiki. Otherwise, if you hear an official announcement within the next few weeks, you’ll know I decided to take the plunge, and if you don’t, then it’s safe to assume this idea went the way of the dodo. If you like this idea, please spread the word through the usual means of the intertubes by sharing this post and the wiki link with others.
Here’s a crazy idea I just had, and I’m wondering what folks think about it.
People do open source for a lot of reasons, ranging from pragmatic to idealistic. Some write a patch every six months or so, others do what they can to dedicate their life to it. Though I try to have a life outside of software, I’m definitely more on the obsessed end of the spectrum when it comes to contributing to open source software.
I find myself in a rather unique situation: Single, living alone in a small studio apartment, only taking a class or two here and there, and basically living off of small contracts. It’s not that I’m not offered big gigs, or that I couldn’t go back to school full time if I really wanted to, I just find I enjoy living a simple lifestyle that lets me spend a lot of time on community oriented projects, especially Ruby stuff.
Right now, I need to do some work each month to pay the rent, and slowly save up to make sure I don’t get evicted during a slow work month. Between BTree and Madriska, I could say that I have two of the most open source friendly commercial relationships I’ve ever seen. Though I’m working on real projects with them, things that have to actually fit some sort of business need, they give me a lot of leeway to improve open source software while working on them, Ruport is pushed along heavily by this.
I could see myself doing that for a while. Working with a few different clients I trust, who in turn hook me up with interesting projects for a variety of companies in various different domains. A lot of it might be Rails work, but not all of it is. Still, in a moment of idealistic fantasy, I thought of another idea:
What if I could just do open source for a while, non-commercially?
How much would it cost for me to do at least 80 hours a month of development on software projects such as PDF::Writer, Ruport, and some other projects I wish I had the time to get my hands on?
I did the math, and the number came out low (subjective). I could meet all my expenses and save some money for about $2000 a month. Basically, if 200 people donated $60 right now, I could take 6 months off and do nearly 500 hours of work, and that’s only if I didn’t find myself obsessed with and doing extra hours on a project. I could more-or-less maintain my lifestyle that I have now, but not take on contracting projects that are either too big or too small out of necessity. Sure, this works out to be a lot lower than my contracting rate, but I could hack entirely on open source projects, maybe write some documentation and articles, and still be able to afford a class or two a semester. Sounds beautiful to me, though I’m sure it’s just a fantasy.
Indulging me for the moment, how would I remain accountable to anyone who supported such a venture? I’d make it transparent as possible. I’d record public hours, with links to changesets, tickets, blog posts, whatever. Though people would have to accept good faith (with at least a roughly outlined plan) as to ‘where I direct the time’, they’d get to see every bit of ‘where the hours went’.
What prevents this from being a total scam? You do. Though I don’t have some A-List reputation, I still make my living based on my reputation as a developer and a contractor. If I somehow totally screwed people who supported such an effort, all it would take would be enough negative feedback from the community to prevent me from getting away with dishonesty.
What would indicate a great success? If after 6 months, this all worked out, and I was interested in doing it for another 6 months, if people funded it, we’d know they actually liked what I did the first time around.
Finally, this doesn’t have to be me. It could be any old hacker you choose, someone you trust that’s working on things you’re interested in. They’d tell you how much it’d cost to have them quit their day job for 6 months, and hopefully people could pool resources. Though the open source community is kept alive by small day to day contributions, we all know the power of having someone dedicated to a project with copious free time.
I’m talking in theory, because obviously there are some complications. If I personally were to do this, I’d need to cycle out of some projects, and figure out to what extent it’d piss of the people I work with. Still, I am sort of curious, is this an idea that belongs in the trashbin, or should I open up a pledgie account for donations? :)
Maybe this is something that could be done on a trial basis, such as ‘40 hrs over 1 month’. This is something I could do without putting a close to all my work. Given that, based on my needs (not my billable rate), that’d be um… 10 dollars from 100 people?
On the one hand, this seems almost like a joke to me, a sort of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’. Still, if some respected Rubyist wanted to steal this idea, undercut me on the price, and ask people to start donating, would I be among them? You bet ya.
Let me know what you think. I’ve tried so hard over the last few years to find ethical and practical ways to work in open source development, and they pretty much work. But because of that, I’ve mostly ignored the idealistic ones, and this is just a shot in the dark at one of those.
I find Ruby’s current warning system, if you can call it that, lacking. Warnings are controlled by the -W flag on the command line, and are generated via the Kernel#warn method within code. There are a host of problems with this approach to warnings.
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 somehow.
Though it made it through the second time around and Phlip answered reasonably, he sent me a private email explaining that he had censored me because I apparently don’t “get” assert { 2.0 }.
Not to pick a fight, but I personally believe that blog posts that have comments turned on should only be moderated for spam and/or abuse, which my comment was neither of. If you’ve got some questions about assert { 2.0 } that you’d like to see stay online without silent censorship, feel free to post them here.
This hopefully serves as a simple reminder that we should keep up with the ‘open’ in open source, and not silence technical questions randomly.
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 that I can give a little more of a balanced account beyond my own crazy ideas.
Here’s my short and rather vague description of what I’ll be talking about:
Lots of people come to Ruby or stick with it because of the community, but what does that mean? In this short talk, we’ll take a look at what the Ruby community has meant over time, what it means now, why it’s dead, and why that’s not a bad thing. Not quite as depressing as it sounds, this talk will focus on how specialized groups such as local Ruby communities, regional conferences, and individual projects have developed their own distinct culture while still being impacted by the Ruby community of old.
What I’d like to know is what readers here have experienced with both “The Ruby Community” as well as Ruby communities in general. This could range anywhere from describing the general feel of your local Ruby users group to picking a bone with some of the ‘untouchable’ aspects of Ruby culture.
I’ve been trying to make my talks a bit more interactive in a sense, hoping to simply set up a discussion rather than pontificate, so having hearing your opinions will help me do that. In return, I promise to write another post titled “Why the Ruby community matters, and why it doesn’t” which will summarize any thoughts people have shared as well as the content of next week’s talk.
Anyway, looking forward to your thoughts. Feel free to be as bold as you’d like, and if you don’t want to be credited for your words, just post anonymously.
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 think in terms of community, or how whether of my work would be useful to people, I was mostly just hacking for hack’s sake.
Eventually, I came to realize what fueled my work in open source, and that was the ability to learn from some truly amazing people, and later, return the favor by doing the same for others. If you like any of the work I’ve done in Ruby, you have exactly one person to thank for getting me started (James Edward Gray II), but hundreds to thank for keeping me going.
Here I’d like to talk a bit about my experience with the Ruby community and how it compares to something completely different, the community surrounding the board game Go. As I played in this past weekend’s North American Oza tournament, the idea for this article came to mind, and hopefully it doesn’t sound much worse in type than it did in my head. I must warn you, if you’re looking for technical depth, you’re not going to find it here, this is mostly just wishy-washy feelings and general observations that’ll only be interesting for those that have an obsession with community dynamics.
If that doesn’t scare you away, feel free to read on.
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, and that a number of things in it ring true with me, even if a bit magnified.
Zed and I have had at least a couple conversations about the Ruby / Rails communities before, and I’d say philosophically, we’re mostly on the same page. The key difference is that Zed is… umm… Zed.
One thing that he pointed out as a difference between us is that I don’t really challenge the status quo. This is true, I prefer to slowly bend the rules rather than shatter them, and see where that takes me. My response though was that I like to challenge the folks who try to suppress those who would challenge the status quo.
So here’s my challenge at a few responses, because everyone loves to stir things up!
However, such a hate-filled nasty person should not be allowed to terrorize the nice, pleasant, and generous Ruby community. Sure there are bad guys out there, there are in any community, but this type of rant is pure crap. Such arrogance and hate are self-destructive. I hope Zed’s self-destruction happens far away from my world, but I wish it would hurry up so the rest of us can get back to enjoying writing code.
Wait a second. Zed is getting in the way of you enjoying writing code? Is Zed Shaw standing there threatening Roundhouse kicks to the head while you try to type in some Ruby code?
Or is Zed distracting you because you’re reading his blog and getting offended? If so… it seems that the solution is the same as if you don’t like something on TV. Change the channel. Go outside and take a walk.
Wear some garlic, I heard Zed hates garlic. Something about how it steals his magic powers.
On a serious note though, saying that hating on people in public is self destructive is like saying that smoking crack is self-destructive. If you think that Zed doesn’t know what he’s doing, you’ve been duped.
I was going to go on and challenge a few more of Zed’s haters. But you know what, I haven’t found any. The closest thing is Giles Bowkett being concerned about how anger is bad for Zed’s heart. There was also something from a consulting company which mostly agreed with Zed’s points, with only minor disagreements.
I’m not defending Zed. As you can see from the posts, he’ll physically defend himself if need be, so he doesn’t need that. I’m also not much of a fanboy, I like mongrel but I can remember when it was just something we were chatting about and playing with at NYC.rb. Still, the real thing that I’d like to confirm here is that he has a point.
If the Ruby community starts to get up in arms when they see rants like this, that’s even more of an indication of the fact that the lines between the Ruby and Rails communities have blurred, and that we’re going to increasingly turn away our best hackers who are interested in real community, beginning a slow slip all the way to JavaOne.
The good news of course is that Technorati lists a number of links to Zed’s rant with comments like “entertaining”, “hilarious”, and other such praises. Every strong community needs heroes and anti-heroes. My question is only who will replace Zed.
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 of my thoughts here in a mini-ramble in hopes of stirring up conversation and ideas.
Got a favorite gem you want to tell the world about? Or one you want to warn other people about? You can do both with Gemtacular!
Gemtacular (http://www.gemtacular.com) is a place to rate and review Ruby gems. It’s a great place to not only find opinions on various gems, but also to see the most recent gem uploads, find the most highly rated gems, or just search for existing gems.
Some quick guidelines:
* Gemtacular is not a place to report bugs. Use the project page for that.
* Be nice. If you have a problem with a particular gem, please explain why without getting nasty.
* Don’t be lame and rate your own gems.1
1I already have a feature request in to try and prevent this at http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=10063&group_id=2863&atid=11067
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 keep a full talk in my head, the following discussion is largely based on ideas from various talks I attended, especially from Nathaniel Talbott, Eric Hodel, Ryan Davis and Evan Phoenix. It also has some sprinklings from the hallway track, as well as some delusions from the back of my mind. Sorting all that out is up to you.
So what is real productivity? Maybe we can look at it as the coding nirvana that we’re all striving for, but I think it’s even more simple than that. True productivity just involves eliminating apathy from your life, leaving you with nothing left but things you care about, and no choice but to take care of them. What follows is a simple extension of that general idea into software practices.
Anyone else think that Godwin’s Law should be amended to include Rails?
Just a thought.
UPDATE (2007.09.27): Several have pointed out that Godwin’s Law isn’t the precise thing that should be updated. Really it’s Case’s Corollary that needs to be changed, thanks for helping me realize this.
SUMMARY: I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.
INTRO / BACKGROUND:
Back in January 2005, I announced on the O’Reilly blog that I was going to completely scrap over 100,000 lines of messy PHP code in my existing CD Baby (cdbaby.com) website, and rewrite the entire thing in Rails, from scratch.
I hired one of the best Rails programmers in the world (Jeremy Kemper aka bitsweat), and we set off on this huge task with intensity. The first few months showed good progress, and Jeremy could not have been more amazing, twisting the deep inner guts of Rails to make it do things it was never intended to do.
But at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails’ preferences. (Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It’s do-able with a lot of glue. But it’s damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you’re really doing this.)
Two years (!) later, after various setbacks, we were less than halfway done.* (To be fair to Jeremy’s mad skillz: many setbacks were because of tech emergencies that pulled our attention to other internal projects that were not the rewrite itself.) The entire music distribution world had changed, and we were still working on the same goddamn rewrite. I said fuckit, and we abandoned the Rails rewrite. Jeremy took a job with 37 Signals, and that was that.
I didn’t abandon the rewrite IDEA, though. I just asked myself one important question:
“Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN’T do?”
The answer is no.
I threw away 2 years of Rails code, and opened a new empty Subversion respository.
Then in a mere TWO MONTHS, by myself, not even telling anyone I was doing this, using nothing but vi, and no frameworks, I rewrote CD Baby from scratch in PHP. Done! Launched! And it works amazingly well.
It’s the most beautiful PHP I’ve ever written, all wonderfully MVC and DRY, and and I owe it all to Rails.
Inspired by Rails:
*- all logic is coming from the models, one per database table, like Martin Fowler’s Active Record pattern.
*- no requires or includes needed, thanks to __autoload.
*- real MVC separation: controllers have no HTML or business-logic, and only use REST-approved HTTP. (GET is only get. Any destructive actions require POST.)
*- all HTML coming from a cute and powerful templating system I whipped up in 80 lines, all multi-lingual and caching and everything
*- … and much more. In only 12,000 lines of code, including HTML templates. (Down from 90,000, before.)
Though I’m not saying other people should do what I’ve done, I thought I should share my reasons and lessons-learned, here:
SEVEN REASONS I SWITCHED BACK TO PHP AFTER 2 YEARS ON RAILS:
#1 - “IS THERE ANYTHING RAILS/RUBY CAN DO THAT PHP CAN’T DO? … (thinking)… NO.”
For 2 years, I thought Rails is genius, PHP is shit. Rails is powerful, PHP is crap.
I was nearly killing my company in the name of blindly insisting Rails was the answer to all questions, timeframes be damned.
But when I took a real emotionless non-prejudiced look at it, I realized the language didn’t matter that much.
Ruby is prettier. Rails has nice shortcuts. But no big shortcuts I can’t code-up myself in a day if needed.
Looked at from a real practical point of view, I could do anything in PHP, and there were many business reasons to do so.
#2 - OUR ENTIRE COMPANY’S STUFF WAS IN PHP: DON’T UNDERESTIMATE INTEGRATION
By the old plan (ditching all PHP and doing it all in Rails), there was going to be this One Big Day, where our entire Intranet, Storefront, Members’ Login Area, and dozens of cron shell scripts were ALL going to have to change. 85 employees re-trained. All customers and clients calling up furious that One Big Day, with questions about the new system.
Instead, I was able to slowly gut the ugly PHP and replace it with beautiful PHP. Launch in stages. No big re-training.
#3 - DON’T WANT WHAT I DON’T NEED
I admire the hell out of the Rails core gang that actually understand every line inside Rails itself. But I don’t. And I’m sure I will never use 90% of it.
With my little self-made system, every line is only what’s absolutely necessary. That makes me extremely happy and comfortable.
#4 - IT’S SMALL AND FAST
One little 2U LAMP server is serving up a ton of cdbaby.com traffic damn fast with hardly any load.
#5 - IT’S BUILT TO MY TASTES
I don’t need to adapt my ways to Rails. I tell PHP exactly what I want to do, the way I want to do it, and it doesn’t complain.
I was having to hack-up Rails with all kinds of plugins and mods to get it to be the multi-lingual integration to our existing 95-table database.
My new code was made just for me. The most efficient possible code to work with our exact needs.
#6 - I LOVE SQL
Speaking of tastes: tiny but important thing : I love SQL. I dream in queries. I think in tables.
I was always fighting against Rails and its migrations hiding my beloved SQL from me.
#7 - PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER
Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.
I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.
But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.
It’s not the language (entirely). It’s you, dude. You’re better now. Give yourself some credit.
Ok. All that being said, I’m looking forward to using Rails some day when I start a brand new project from scratch, with Rails in mind from the beginning.
But I hope that this reaches someone somewhere thinking, “God our old code is ugly. If we only threw it all away and did it all over in Rails, it’d be so much easier!”
It’s often been said that Perl’s greatest strength is CPAN, Perl’s vast collection of free libraries contributed by developers from around the world. Recently I started to wonder about RubyForge and how RubyForge stacks up against CPAN in general.1
Consider this fact: Multi-core CPUs are not only the future, they’re the only way CPUs can continue to grow at their current pace. It’s also a hotly debated subject in the software world. Multi-threaded programming is different and not seen as often as procedural programming, and therefore it’s not yet as well understood. So the question is, how can programming languages (and Ruby in particular) make it easier to harness these systems?
As Ruby struggles to graduate from its current implementation into something more powerful, we’ve already seen several projects attempt to update Ruby to help developers cope. Those who’ve been working with Ruby for awhile may remember YARV, which promises to provide more threading support. JRuby offers all the power of Java’s threads to Ruby, if it can harness it. And Evan Phoenix’s small but rapidly growing project Rubinius is attempting to be the next big contender.
No matter what implementation becomes the next de-facto Ruby platform, one thing is clear: People are interested in taking advantage of their newer, more powerful multi-core systems (as the recent surge in interest in Erlang in recent RailsConf and RubyConfs has shown). As Ruby becomes increasingly part of solutions that deal in high volumes of data processing, this demand can only increase.
That’s why it’s so very surprising to see David Heinemeier Hansson dismiss the whole notion out of hand regarding Rails. His argument seems to be that Rails already scales to multiple cores in the same way it scales to multiple machines, via UNIX process distribution. After all, isn’t this the very crux of “Share Nothing?”
Here’s an open question that I’m hoping will get some interesting discussion going:
Why are there so few Ruby jobs out there?
Those of you who have been to RubyConf in recent years have been asked the question “How many people get paid to write Ruby?”, and you’d see that in the last year or two, the number of people who raise their hand has absolutely skyrocketed.
However, at Gotham Ruby Conference, someone asked “How many people are paid to write plain Ruby, no Rails”. I think like 3 hands went up, and I was one of them, out of 120 or so people. It’s possible that we just have a lot of Rails work in NYC, but I think the issue might be deeper than that.
I’ve seen so many of my friends say “Oh, I’d rather be writing pure Ruby, but at least working in Rails gets me close to that, and it’s better than working in <insert_language_here>”.
Is Ruby really only viable for database driven web applications? I doubt it. I think it can stand its ground anywhere Perl or Python could. So why is it that most job postings you see are for some sort of “Web Rockstar”, and not like, a sysadmin with scripting experience, or an internal applications developer?
I guess it could be a lot of things, any of the below or a combination might be to blame:
I don’t really know what it is. I understand when corporate politics get involved, all things go out the window, but I think that Ruby’s success as a commercially viable language outside of Rails is less than what it should be at this point. Do other people feel the same way?
UPDATE: Buried deep within the mixed replies to this post is a great writeup by Andy Peters which states more assertively what I was implying here…
With the decent success of the last post, why not throw another opinion into the mix?
This is something that comes up every now and again on RubyTalk and other community forums, but it always starts something like this: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could start teaching Ruby in schools instead of C/C++/Java/Forth/Lisp/Fortan/COBOL/BASIC/Brainf*ck?”
I usually try to shy away from opinion posts (on this blog and elsewhere). When I do make them, I usually ask a few people if they think I’m asking for trouble.
This post: I don’t care if I am (but I hope I’m not).
We’ve put some effort into increasing the signal on this blog over the last week or so.
I personally am super happy with the new content up here. But it’d be interesting to see what folks think about our progress as a whole.
So like a truck driver with a “How’s My Driving” sign on his big rig, I’ve created a Jyte claim.
It’s simply, “The O’Reilly Ruby Blog has improved since 2007.03.21″
Anyone with an OpenID can come support or bury this claim, and let us know if we’re truckin’ fine or veering off the mountain.
I’ll try to stop with the meta-posting… expect a Digging Deep article soon!
Here is a nice looking javascript date widget that you can embed in your RoR application. Instructions on installing the widget into your Rails applications is provided on the home page.
I’ll definitely be giving it a whirl.
This blog has some of the best Ruby talent floating around on it.
Problem is, it seems like many folks are too busy, too tied up with other blogs, or too (something) to post here.
Some of us want to turn that around. I’ve been talking community for the last week or so, and I’d like to start eating my own dog food right here at home.
We’ve already started discussions on the internal mailing list, I’m willing to open Pandora’s box and ask you readers what you are looking for. What things do you like and want to see more of? What things do you dislike and want to see banned from ORA and possible chased by an army of undead pirates?
If you go back and look at the list of authors we have here, there is serious potential for a cool ruby resource. Problem is, no one knows quite what to do anymore, since the overall feel over here is a little fragile.
I was pretty excited when O’Reilly set up a Ruby blog. I’d like to see that excitement restored among the bloggers here. So, readers, what can we do to make you happy?
If it involves Chunky Bacon, so be it!
Rails for All is a RoR web site, which is interested in promoting RoR as the platform of choice for user centric, database-backed web application. The site allows you to promote your Ruby or RoR users group and also register yourself or your company as RoR developers.
RoR content portals are springing up all over the place.
There has been more talk on top RoR blogs on the the ror-talk mailing list this week. Here are five blogs i subscribe too.
It’s old news now that Aptana has picked up the RadRails development effort and you’d probably notices that the radrails.org domain no longer exists. The new domain is radrails.net. Aptana has already introduced nightly builds and are working towards a 0.8 release, although I couldn’t find any information on time lines.
This is all good news for Eclipse users like myself. Currently, I am getting by with the 0.7.2 and the command line but ‘chafing at the bit’ for Aptana’s first release.
Reports of the death of Ruby Code & Style have been greatly exaggerated.
I’ve been the Editor-in-Chief of Artima’s Ruby Code & Style for somewhat over a year now. For various reasons, I am stepping down.
Just to be clear, I’ve had nothing but good experiences helping get the ‘zine up and out the door, and have endless appreciation for all those who pitched in and made things happen. It’s mainly a matter of time; I cannot give it the attention it deserves.
I expect a formal announcement on this to appear on the RC&S site before long, so I’ll the details to that. But I want to at least assure people that that the ‘zine has not simply up and died. It continues.
So there is at least one Ruby magazine (albeit online-only) that is around. But people should appreciate that organizing and maintaining a good publication is non-trivial.
Getting and preparing a steady flow of high-quality material is not easy. It’s a job. The goal for RC&S was to publish content a cut above what one typically finds in, say, Linux Journal or on most blogs.
That’s not meant as knock on those sources, just that there is zero reason to publish one more “How To Write a Blog in Rails” article.
I recently replied to an email on the ror-talk mailing list about resources on agile methodology and RoR. Here are four non-RoR specific resources that i have used during the past 12 months
I’d like to hear what resources other people are using?
It looks like development for the RadRails plugin for Eclipse has stalled and the key contributors are flat out working on a startup venture. Who can blame them we all need to eat. So the search for an alternative Windows Ruby\RailsIDE has started. I’ve read a log about textmate/, the mac os editor and was curious why they never offered a Linux/Windows version. Well the power of textmate has come to windows with .e-texteditor.
I just downloaded it the demo version and first impressions are very positive indeed. Not enough there yet to move me from Eclipse but it is getting there.
You should take a look at it.
(correction): fixed Upton Sinclair quote it is ’salary’ not ‘job’ (thanks for the correction)
Even with all the buzz, it is still a tough sell. If you’ve suggested Rails as an alternative to (Java|.NET) at work, you’ve probably experienced some reactionary pushback. Convincing a set of established “Enterprisy” engineers that Rails is worth paying attention to it is like convincing a Texas oil baron that he should purchase a Subcompact hybrid vehicle and become a Vegan. Why is convincing a highly paid (Java|.NET) programmer to look at Rails that difficult? I’ll steal a quote from Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that he, in turn, stole from Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
In an effort to convince, you may have sent people to some of the good Ruby on Rails blogs. This might have escalated the resistance. Asking your fellow enterprise developers to read DHH’s loudthinking.com, is like asking (the other) O’Reilly to sit down with Colbert - Mr. Enterprise isn’t going to appreciate the message because he’ll be focused on the ridicule. Rails, rightly so, is positioned as the challenger, and it makes good use of hyperbolic ridicule to gain converts. This works for most of us, but I’ve also seen it push some entrenched Java developers further away.
So, you are in “The Big Planning” meeting, and your boss says something like, “There is no time to finish this project, we’re going to have to tell the customer we won’t meet the deadline.” You wearily offer up the suggestion: “We might be able to deliver something on time if we used Rails to implement the web application”. And, an entire room full of Java programmers is now trying to tell you every reason from here to the North Pole why your suggestion is naïve. Here are some of the common responses:
Let’s take each one individually…read on…
A comparison between the #5 language (ranked popularity by Tiobe on Jan/07) and the #1 framework (ranked lovability by me!).
My hometown, St. Louis, is hardly one of the great meccas of the computing world. Places like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York were the first to have local training available. Yet, even here in St. Louis, if you want Ruby on Rails training you now have more than one choice (competition is good). Last year OCI unveiled local RoR training, and now Inspired Horizons is doing the same. I’d be willing to bet that this is quietly happening all over.
Help prove me right. Do you live in a place that is not considered one of the computing hot spots, yet you still have local Ruby or Ruby on Rails training available? If so, post a comment and tell us about it!
Sometimes I feel like a slacker. I don’t subscribe to Ruby-Talk or any of the official Rails mailing lists. I just don’t have time to read 500 messages a day!
I do lurk on several local Ruby mailing lists. The traffic is usually smaller and the content is top notch.
Here are a few that I enjoy reading…
NOTE: If you choose to subscribe, be courteous. Lurk for a few weeks and get an idea for the content that is posted before starting a new thread.
One common criticism of the RubyQuiz is that the quizzes are ‘too hard’.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. It’s more likely that the difficulty comes from the RubyQuiz being so diverse in the topics it covers.
It might be easier if we could sort through and find the quiz topics we’re interested in.
Using del.icio.us, we can easily tag the quizzes with the tag rubyquiz and then a series of topics for each quiz.
Then, when people visit quizzes, they can look up the tags for the page to see at a glance what the quiz covers.
We can also go to the rubyquiz tag to see a list of related topics, and then see just the quizzes that fall under topics we’re interested in.
If the idea catches on, maybe JEG2 would include some sort of handy way to view these tags right alongside quiz summaries. Even without it, this would still be helpful for anyone using del.icio.us that likes the RubyQuiz.
I’m going to spend some time today tagging, and I’m hoping others do the same. Let’s help make RubyQuiz even better by making it even easier to reference the many cool topics it covers!
I love the fact that RubyForge is available for us. It’s one resource that almost every Ruby developer working on free software is bound to need. One thing that I don’t like is how we pull in the GForge juggernaut for projects that often consist of one or two files.
If you look around RubyForge, you’ll notice that many projects have 10 tabs on their project page: Summary, Forums, Tracker, Lists, Tasks, Docs, Surveys, News, SCM and Files. While in theory this is a great idea, it’s rare for a developer to want to use GForge for all 10 of those things. Today I finally decided to poke through the admin interface and find the “Public Information” section. All of these things can easily be hidden.
As I poke around RubyForge, I do see I might be a little late to the cleanup party. The Rails project on rubyforge is blissfully barren, and many other popular libraries have done this as well. But as a word to those who are still showing ten tabs and using two, tweak your UI. It’s better to have a user email you and ask you where your mailing list is than it is for them to post on a forum that you never knew existed and not get an answer.
Just hoping to bring a little zen to RubyForge, and to never see this message again:
“This project has no visible documents”
