I added another articles section for my other love language Erlang.

The first article is just a quick intro into this cool and powerful language, I will be sharing more soon..

http://carlosgabaldon.com/erlang/hello-erlang/

Great quote by Paul Graham which explains why working in a large software development organization sucks.

..we can get a portrait of the “normal” world. It’s populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.

http://www.paulgraham.com/kate.html

I recently did another interview by Dmitry Belitsky on “How to become successful rubyist”. Dmitry is an up an coming web developer who put together a great set of interviews with several top Ruby hackers.

http://belitsky.info/freelance/carlos-gabaldon/

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Satish Talim for his RubyLearning Blog on his mini series – “How do I learn and master Sinatra?” – by top Rubyists using Sinatra.

The interview series provides insight and commentary from notable Sinatra developers, with the goal of facilitating and providing answers to the questions Ruby beginners face on how to learn and master Sinatra.

Satish Talim is a programmer, author, trainer, and speaker. A recognized expert in the field of software development with over 30+ years of I.T. experience, Satish has consulted and trained teams at various companies in India and the US.

http://rubylearning.com/blog/2009/07/21/carlos-gabaldon-how-do-i-learn-and-master-sinatra/

Since I have been playing around with Sinatra again, I decided that what Sinatra needs is some automation for some of the boring day to day tasks. So I created a GitHub bucket to dump my Rake tasks. I only have 1 task, to create a new project, but I have a lot new projects that I will be doing in Sinatra in the coming months, so I know there will be a cornucopia of tasks.

Sinatra-rake-tasks

I wrote another article on the cool Ruby web framework DSL Sinatra.

In my last article I wrote about the cool Ruby DSL web framework called Sinatra which is taking the Ruby world by storm. I decided that another “How to” article on some of Sintra’s other kick ass features was just what Frank would expect.
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Read More..

Over the past few months I have been feeling burned out with my career. I feel like I have lost focus on why I got into software in the first place. I am a hacker and a geek who loves things like learning new languages each year or geeking out with Order theory. But lately, I have been pulled more into the world of project management and endless meetings. I am spread so thin across so many different projects and initiatives that I spend my days planning and telling other people what to do, but very little time doing any real work myself. Of course planning and leading people is very important and if you “get it” you need to help other people “get it”, but for hard core engineers this can wear on you quickly. Every few years I tend to be get pulled out of engineering toward management, which I guess means someone thinks I am doing something right, but I have to find my way back.

So what to do? I need to get back to the basics and do some hard core hacking. What does that mean? I have been actively contributing to several open source projects over the past few years. Open source is very rewarding, but I think doing a large project in my first language (C) will remind me why I love programming.  Maybe write an operating system; my own BSD distro? Or maybe a new language?

This year I said that I was going to tweet more. With just 1 month into this year I have to say that I love tweeting, so much that I find it harder to want to blog. There is something so powerful about the informality of sending out a tweet. I know blogging can be just as informal, but every time I sit down to blog I feel like I am getting prepared to write a college term paper or a presentation for work. I feel like I have some type of quota of words to meet to even be worth posting. This is where the 140 character limit of Twitter is so powerful, because whenever you want to say something you have to be as concise as possible with your words.

So let’s see how the year goes, but for those that follow my blog you will probably find more activity following me on Twitter.

I have been using slicehost for over a year. I think that they are a great company and I highly recommend them if you are looking for a cheap VPS to host something that you are working on where you want full control. That being said, with Google App Engine on the scene now I really have no use for slicehost, so I am canceling it. I am a hacker not a Sysadmin and I really do not want to become one. With App Engine I can just focus on the product idea and the code and not have to worry about deployment and scalability. So I am working on my next big product idea that I am going to run completely on App Engine, backed by GitHub of course.

More to come soon..

I am in the process of moving posts from my old site.  I decided that some posts were really articles so I am organizing the articles by topic. The first section is on my love language, Ruby..

http://carlosgabaldon.com/ruby/