Entries categorized 'InfoQ'

Just a quick note:  I recently purchased the Rails Rescue Handbook by Mike Gunderloy from his web site.  The book gives a lot of great tips and best approaches to taking on a Rails project that may not be up-to-par.

I think the book addresses many of the areas we face as Rails consultants on daily basis and should guide us in our own coding efforts and reviewing and refactoring the code of others.

Mike talked with me about the book in an interview for InfoQ to give folks a better understanding of where problems and bad code can occur and what to do about it. 

Please take the time to check out the interview - Rescuing Your Ruby on Rails Projects.

 

Just wanted to point out my interview with Rubyist, Jeremy McAnally is up on InfoQ.  The interview covers Jeremy’s new book, Ruby in Practice.  I really love talking to other Rubyists and my role at InfoQ let me do this.  I usually learn a few things from every interview, whether it be the perspective they see in Ruby, the future of Ruby or some obscure feature I wasn’t aware of before.  In this case I really like Jeremy’s perspective of Ruby in the enterprise.

The interview also includes exclusive access to Chapter 5 : Web Services from the book.  Readers interested in how to make best use of RESTful web services, SOAP and legacy system integration with Ruby should give it a read.

Read the interview in its entirety on the InfoQ web site – Ruby in Practice with Jeremy McAnally.  Any feedback is surely welcome.

I recently had the opportunity to review a copy of David A. Black’s new book, The Well-Grounded Rubyist.  I interviewed David for InfoQ, which is now live on the site.  Please take a moment to give the interview a read, I think it was pretty insightful.

David covers many topics including how he got started with Ruby, suggestions on how developers should learn Ruby to his views on moving to Ruby 1.9.1:

I'm afraid that, with all due respect to the core Ruby development team, I'm not a believer in 1.8.7. It's been described as a stepping-stone to 1.9, and that, together with some of the birth pains of 1.9 as a stable version, has provided a kind of safe haven for people who want some 1.9-era features but are skittish about 1.9. That's kind of unfortunate.

I'd encourage people very strongly at least to install 1.9.1, and see what problems you come up against. I don't think that making 1.8 more like 1.9 is the answer. It sends the message that there's a reason to avoid 1.9 -- and while that may have been true before 1.9.1, as far as I can tell it's now stable and on as solid a footing as any such release before it.

Although the piece is an interview and not a review of the book, I had to hold back my personal views.  I think this book is a definite read and should be in every Ruby developer’s library.  If you are new to Ruby or experienced, this book holds a lot of great information and is a great reference to how Ruby works, the standard libraries and best-practices.  When I review books I normally are sent printed review copies or PDF versions of they exist, I liked this book so much I bought my own copy.

I will likely give a detailed review at another time so look for it here in the future.

I have to admit I have tried using various IDE’s to build Ruby on Rails applications, Aptana RadRails and NetBeans are two, yet have come back to TextMate each time.  I can’t say any of what I have tried were particularly bad, actually they were pretty good, but seemed a bit hefty for the work at hand.  Recently, JetBrains released RubyMine 1.0 as their entry into Ruby IDE’s.  I started using it for a couple of Rails projects I have been working on and I have to say, I am impressed with it so far.  I plan to write up a further review or result of my work later here and on InfoQ but I need to work with it a bit more.

In the meantime, I had the opportunity to speak with the lead developer of RubyMine, Dmitry Jemerov, about RubyMine and the direction they are taking.  It seems they are listening intently to their users.  I can say this because as a RubyMine beta tester I had issues and they were promptly addressed. 

The future looks bright for this product and I intend to keep using it to give it a fair test.  Please take a few minutes to read my interview on InfoQ titled Talking RubyMine with JetBrains Developer Dmitry Jemerov.

I had the opportunity to chat with Gregg Pollack about his recent venture into screencasting about scaling Ruby on Rails.  It was an interesting interview and I hope it gives those folks not sure about Ruby on Rails, because they have heard it can’t scale, a chance to look at it again.  It certainly can but like any other platform it needs to be done right.

Thanks Gregg.

My recent interview with New Relic CEO, Lewis Cirne is now up on InfoQ.  I met Lewis at act_as_conference and chatted about the new release of RPM 1.2 which gives our Rails applications some great insight.

Please give it a read, I think it goes into some good detail what RPM can do for Rails developers.  I am trying out the lite version in a personal project so I can give it a go for my client work.

The New Relic blog has the announcement of the new features in the event you don’t know what I am referring to.

My role as Ruby Editor with InfoQ gives me the opportunity to learn about really new technologies and more importantly to meet some really cool people.

My latest interview is up on InfoQ now which is a talk with Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng, the authors of Rails for .NET Developers published by the Pragmatic Programmers.

It was a fun interview as it has a lot of the same person issues I went through learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails after all of the years of .NET.

 

UPDATE: The conference sessions and the interviews will be up on the InfoQ site at www.infoq.com/rubyfringe.  Look for them in the coming weeks.

Here is the gang from InfoQ at the recent RubyFringe conference in Toronto with some additional folks:

From left to right - Werner Schuster (InfoQ), Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub, Powerset), Floyd Marinescu (InfoQ), Joseph Hurtado (innocent bystander, photographer and Ruby fan), and myself.

I had a great time at RubyFringe this weekend and interview many speakers, 12 in total.  InfoQ also taped all 20 sessions (Zed's included).  This was my first trip to Toronto and loved the city which is truly an amazing city.

Thank you to Joseph for posting the photos which include the one above.  The complete set shot can be found on Joseph's Flickr page.

Today was the first day of RubyFringe here in Toronto Canada. The conference put on by Unspace and they have done a great job. Last night we enjoyed a get-together at the Amsterdam Brewery with free wine, beer and finger food. I think everyone had a great time.

I am here partially for my own interests and to do some interviews on Sunday for InfoQ. InfoQ has a large presence here at RubyFringe because they are a Toronto-based company and to support the local Ruby community. InfoQ is videotaping all the sessions and will have all of the sessions in full on the InfoQ web site very soon, so please look for those as each session is well-worth viewing.

I missed a couple speakers so I can only give a little bit of information on the ones I watched.

The Speakers

Jay Phillips

Jay's talk was about writing telephony applications with Ruby. He is the creator of the Adhearsion framework for creating VoIP applications with Ruby. The story of his success with the VoIP and the creation of the framework was really interesting. I don't personally have clients asking me for VoIP work but this framework look like a good place to start.

Jay has a great personality for presentations and makes the content very interesting.

Dan Grigsby

I have never seen Dan talk and was not familiar with him at all but after his talk I was inspired to look at ideas and execution differently. Dan talked more about how to approach creating applications from a business standpoint rather from a technological one. He explained how his approach to finding a winning idea is to try many things and see what sticks because you never know. An idea may be successful by surprise as he did with PayMe.

Tobias Lutke

Tobias is known as a developer of Shopify but came to RubyFringe with a talk about using Memcached with black belt style and the talk was right on target. He showed the crowd the basics of using it with Ruby but dove in right away to show us how to use it hardcore and take advantage of this great caching mechanism.

Yehuda Katz

This is one of the Engine Yard guys who is focusing on Merb and all of the great smaller projects associated with it. I think this was a great overview or preview of one of the many things Engine Yard is doing with their funding. Y

Luke Francl

Luke's talk focused on how a developer can go overboard with testing and how not to let this happen to you. The talk takes on all of the excitement there is around Test Driven Development (TDD) and the ways developers get themselves so involved in testing that they can unnecessarily test too much.

The importance of testing is covered but Luke brings up the idea that we may be doing more than we have to sometimes and for some people not using tests and get by with it that it's OK.

Look for an interview with Luke on InfoQ coming shortly as we took time with Luke and tried to get some deeper incite into his ideas.

Obie Fernandez

This was one of the talks I looked forward to most as Obie is one of the more prolific personalities in the Ruby community but I also knew this was not a technical talk. This talk was about taking the proper approach from the sales side of consulting. We too often get over involved with being a good technical person but neglect sales.

This is a good talk even for people like myself who has a good sales background and makes sure we don't forget what's important. Things to keep in mind is:

• Always be closing.
• Make your hourly rate more than you think you are worth as clients will try to negotiate down.
• Know when to say no and don't take all work that comes along.

Any chance you can get to hear Obie speak, you should do it.

Matt Todd

Matt claims he is a nobody and is dumb and uses it to his advantage. His talk was a really good one and made a lot of sense. Although it did not include specific technical content, it has great advice. In short Matt tells everyone to get out there, try stuff, fail and try some more.

It is commonsense and a well-known fact that if we don't try and fail that we will not achieve success. Matt works with the fine folks at Highgroove Studios so he must be doing something right.

Jeremy McAnally

Jeremy who is the author of the Humble Little Ruby Book which is available for free from InfoQ is a good place for people to start learning Ruby. His talk was a good talk giving developers perspective using frameworks that maybe a bit too big for our needs. Jeremy explains it may be better just to create your own framework for you needs instead of being forced into the way large frameworks make you do your job.

Zed Shaw

Everyone in the community knows Zed, he is likely the most outspoken among anyone but he does have great points and is a really good speaker. This is his last Ruby conference talk and he says he will not be doing any more Ruby or Rails development.

This was Zed's sendoff from the Ruby community and he did it in style. He talked briefly about Ruby and moved on to music, a current passion of his. Zed involved his audience in creating music on stage with a small guitar and sound machine into an HP subnotebook.

Zed gave a fair well song which included references to DHH and Chad Fowler. The audience enjoyed the talk and cheered often. Zed seems like a really bright guy and it is sad to see him go. The songs will be available for download and free distribution.

The talks have been really good so far and I am confident this will continue tomorrow.

I wrote an article and published it today on InfoQ, called ADO.NET Entity Framework Taking Some Heat.  It is about the recent petition put out by some industry folks concerned about the soon-to-be-released version 1.0 of the framework, called ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence.

I was a little reluctant to published the article with fear of taking a side and not just reporting the facts.  It is a good battle with two sides who are clearly passionate about their work.