Ablog

I recently interviewed both Matt Wade (the editor of Practical OCaml) and Joshua Smith (the author).

It was pretty interesting to see behind the publishers curtain with Matt. I especially like his forthright answer to “What will it take to see another   (more...)

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 why COBOL, for example, has survived all this time when almost everyone says it’s a very bad language. It’s because   (more...)

I’ve finished and posted the second half of my new interview with the JRuby guys. Lots more cool thoughts about Ruby, JRuby, the JVM, continuations, and development. Take a look. (Hmm, now not only do we need a Ruby tag, but one for Jruby as well.)

I’ve posted part one of a new interview with Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, and (non-Sun employee) Ola Bini about JRuby, their roles, and Java/Ruby development in general.

Here’s an excerpt:

Okay Charles, since you brought up refactoring tools — you and Thomas, are supposed   (more...)

With Apress’ impending leap into Ruby (I’m still in shock over 10 titles being announced at once), it seems like there ought to be a Ruby category here at the blog. I know I could’ve used it for any number of my posts and Cory’s recent post is another good example.

Please, can we have a little Ruby love here?

Sometimes, news happens when you’re not there (even if you have a bit of forewarning. I spent yesterday up in the Wasatch Mountains doing maintenance work on a Camp for disabled youth as a part of the Salt Lake City United Way “Day of Caring” (2,600 volunteers from 96 companies worked on 110 projects — it was a great way to spend the day). The only down side was that I missed the news that (more...)

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 Code, working on Ruport to implement several features requested by the community. Gregory is also an active member of   (more...)

We’re 2/3 of the way through the presentations so far, and they’ve been very good so far (I’ll exclude my own, since I’m a bit biased). 1/3 of the talks so far have been non-Rails, and those have been the ones I’ve been most iterested in.

Patrick Hurley spoke right after me, and did an engaging presentation on eeking out the last bits of performance by rewriting methods in C using the Ruby C API. Not only did he have a lot of meat to his talk,   (more...)

If you’re going to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan tomorrow (or if you could be), the first ever RubyConf*MI is going to be running from 9AM until 6:30PM. Registration opens at 8:30AM and is just $20 …

There’s a great schedule that includes 9 presentations about Ruby and Rails. (I’m speaking right after lunch, and will be talking about Ruby libraries for developers.)

Hope to see you there.

FOSCon was amazing! Picture 100 Ruby geeks and Ruby geek wannabes gathered in a fairly small industrial building that’s been converted into something I heard described as “a frat house for geeks”. There were five talks (Lucas Carlson, Topher Cyll, Ryan Davis>, Geoffrey Grossenbach, Jim Weirich, and Amy   (more...)

I just spent some time talking to folks at the Apress booth here at OSCon (Hi Julie). It looks like a nice set up. I was floored to see ‘The Rails Roadmap’ peing passed out showing TEN Ruby Titles (6 of which already have ISBNs assigned). I’m really excited to see this kind of investment in the Ruby community from APress. I’m hoping to see some matching involvement in the community. If you’re an APress Ruby author, I’d love to talk to you, please drop me a line. I’m pat dot eyler   (more...)

Update: It appears that this is another case of a community member abusing the community for their personal ends. I’d encourage readers to look at http://ruby.outertrack.com, the original source of the docs. This is not the first complaint I’ve heard about the author of the ruby and rails manuals about similar behaviour. I apologize for not looking more deeply before I posted.

Since Steve was kind enought to point out the Ruby on Rails manual and some upcoming   (more...)

When Gary Cornell, Jim Minatel, and Tim O’Reilly started writing about their respective takes on publishing, I started writing about mine (here, here, here, and here). I promised that I’d go into   (more...)

Gary Cornell, Jim Minatel and Tim O’Reilly have been trading statistics, insights and barbs over the technical publishing market recently. I’ve been reading them with a great deal of interest because what they have to say strongly affects me as both a producer and a consumer of technical materials. I think each of them is looking at the whole somewhat myopically though (bold words for someone without nearly as much time or effort invested as any of them). Here’s my take.

The technical publishing   (more...)

Tim O’Reilly has been posting about the book market over the last couple of days, and it’s been quite informative. He calls out Apress, Wrox, and (more...)

If you use emacs, Ruby, and autotest (three cool toys by the way), you should go look at Sean Carley’s ZenMacs blog post. It’s a nice little trick to make your life easier.

I’ve just started writing a bi-weekly article about Ruby for the Linux Journal’s website. The first article is online here. It’s great to see the growing interest among consumers and publishers. I was really excited to see that Apress has a Ruby title on the way as well — Beginning Ruby on Rails: From Novice to Professional. The Ruby community is growing, and the Ruby bookshelf   (more...)

zenspider and Eric Hodel are at it again. Hot on the heals of the 3.0.0 release of ZenTest, which featured autotest (a cool new testing helper), they’re talking about 3.1.0, which will feature multiruby. Pre-announcement blog posts can be found here and (more...)

Just a quick post to point out updates to two cool Ruby packages, Ajax Scaffolding for Rails and Mr Guid (a graphical debugger for Ruby).

The new version of Ajax Scaffold features a number of small cleanups, as well as graceful degradation for those browsers without Ajax support. As Richard White, the main developer, puts it — “Now the 0.37%   (more...)

I used to work at Amazon.com, where I would occasional run into this guy named Steve Yegge. He was a brilliant coder, who would occasionally publish “Stevey’s Drunken Blog Rants” on his internal blog — you can still read the best of them here. These weren’t your usual blog posts, they talked about programming, interviewing, hiring, and working in ways that make you re-examine what you do from day to day and how you do it.

As   (more...)