Tonight we had the March meeting of the Northern VA Ruby Users Group. First up was Douglas Sellers who talked about Selenium and Selenium on Rails. After a short break, I spoke about RESTful Rails (focusing on CRUD, REST and ActiveResource).
Mar 21
You know how you go to a conference and most of the smart, interesting folks are using Apple hardware? I’ve been noticing a trend among my colleagues at work and those whom I’ve met at user groups and conferences–the very same folks who are at the top of their game developing software also drive Acuras. Coincidence?
Disclaimer: Yes, I drive a 2004 Acura TL and one reason (out of many) that I bought the car was for the technology (bluetooth hands-free-link, for example). Though I’m not conceited enough to consider myself a kick-ass software engineer.
Mar 04
This month we had Chad Fowler as a guest speaker at NoVA RUG. His talk was entitled “Quick and Clean Rails Development.” Here’s the abstract for his talk:
Rails is all about speed. It has been said that Rails programmers can develop software ten times faster than those programming in technologies such as .NET or J2EE. Rails itself is evolving at the speed of light.
But, to paraphrase Martin Fowler’s RailsConf 2006 keynote, with Rails we don’t have to choose between Quick and Dirty and Slow and Clean. With Ruby, and therefore Rails, we can have both speed and maintainability.
With Rails, the speed comes naturally. As it turns out, the cleanliness often doesn’t. This talk will focus on how to make your application development both quick _and_ clean.
Read on for a summary of Chad’s talk.
Update: I found a video of this talk which Chad gave at Rails eXchange in London here.
Continue reading »
Mar 04
By the final day of the conference my head was about to explode with the amount of new information crammed into it. There were some great tips and tricks on the final day, but overall, I think the conference peaked on day two. Here’s a run down of the sessions for day three:
- Buried Treasure: Hidden Rails Tips by Dave Thomas
- The Streamlined Framework by Justin Gehtland
- Rinda and DRb by Justin Gehtland
- Amazon’s S3 Web Services by Marcel Molina, Jr.
- Rake: Building Up Ruby by Jim Wierich
- Rails Production Tips and Tricks by James Duncan Davidson
Mar 04
The second day of the conference was even better than the first, in my opinion. There were several more talks which I was eager to hear. Here’s an overview of the second day’s presentations:
- Creating Rails Plugins by Chad Fowler and Bruce Williams
- The Presenter Pattern by Marcel Molina, Jr.
- The Deployment Golden Path by James Duncan Davidson
- Testing Rails Apps by Stu Halloway
- Red, Green, Refactor by Jim Weirich
- Building View Frameworks by Bruce Williams
- Lightning Talks
Read on for my notes. Continue reading »
Mar 04
Recently, I attended The Rails Edge conference run by The Pragmatic Studio. It was a single track event with some of the best and brightest folks in the Rails and Ruby community. The speaker line-up was as follows:
- Dave Thomas
- Mike Clark
- James Duncan Davidson
- Chad Fowler
- Justin Gehtland
- Stuart Halloway
- Marcel Molina, Jr.
- Jim Weirich
- Bruce Williams
Read on for a description of the first day’s sessions.
Continue reading »
Mar 02
I’ve been looking for a good introductory book on Erlang for quite awhile now. Unfortunately, the Concurrent Programming in Erlang book just doesn’t do it for me (plus only the first part is available online). Thankfully, it looks like the Pragmatic Programmers have come through with Programming Erlang.
