On Ruby

wave and interviews ... Too new or the wrong medium?

2009-10-29T07:37:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to do an interview for my blog using wave, and so far it's not going very well.When I first thought about it, using wave to interview a small group seemed pretty natural. The idea of a free flowing discussion with the ability to go back and massage the stream a bit felt more like sitting around a table and talking than sending emails back and forth.I asked the team from The Compleat

Leveraging the Net

2009-10-13T11:05:00.003-07:00

Second up in my series of posts about leveraging communities is the topic of the Internet. I don't want to talk about mailing lists or sites like github yet, I'll cover those when I talk about User Groups and Free Software. I do want to touch on google, blogs, and aggregators.There's a lot of information out there, but how you use it and how deeply you interact with it determine how much it

Leveraging Books

2009-10-13T07:13:00.001-07:00

As I talk about leveraging community to be more effective at what you do, let's start out with books. I think this is a good theme to develop because it really shows how the three levels of passive, engaged, and committed involvement provide successively more benefit. Books are also an easy gateway into improving yourself because people are used to reading as a learning method — we did it in

Leveraging the Community to be a Better ...

2009-10-06T06:46:00.003-07:00

I'm giving a presentation at work about leveraging communitites to become a better developer/tester/sys admin and I thought that I should really drink the kool-aid and make it a better presentation by involving the community. Over the next week, I'll be making a series of blog posts covering the material from my presentation. I'd really like to see two outcomes:hopefully people outside my

Finding or Keeping a Tech Job -- An interview with Andy Lester and Chad Fowler

2009-07-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

Andy Lester (@theworkinggeek) and Chad Fowler (@chadfowler) the authors of Land the Tech Job You Love and The Passionate Programmer, respectively, agreed to do a joint interview with me. It was a lot of fun to talk with these guys, I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I did doing it.Your books look like great companions to each other. Did you interact at all when writing them?Chad

Ruby Hoedown 2009 mini-Interview with Jeremy McAnally

2009-06-30T11:21:00.002-07:00

Jeremy McAnally (@jm) is a good friend, and we've worked together on regional Ruby conferences and other projects. With the Ruby Hoedown looming, I thought it was about time to sit down with him for a mini-interview about his free conference. How have the community and your sponsors responded to making the Ruby Hoedown free? Jeremy Everyone has largely been in two camps: "Wow that's awesome!"

A Ruby Couple: Interview with James and Dana Gray

2009-06-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

It's another week without a Questions Five Ways discussion, but I've got another great interview that more than makes up for it. James Gray (@JEG2) is very well known in the Ruby community. His wife, Dana, is less well known, but won't stay that way for long. Fresh from her Ruby presenting debut, a lightning talk on Ruby regular expressions at MWRC, the two of them are embarking on a joint

People Behind GoGaRuCo, Josh Susser

2009-06-19T04:50:00.005-07:00

I didn't get a Questions Five Ways discussion done this week, hopefully I'll get that back on track next week. I did finish up another project I've been working on for far too long though, an interview with Josh Susser (@hasmanyjosh), one of the GoGaRuCo organizers. Josh is a longtime member of the Ruby community, and a very smart guy. I'm grateful that he took a the time to talk with me, I

Reading and Testing Your Legacy Code

2009-06-10T08:25:00.002-07:00

In this week's installment of Questions Five Ways, we're talking about testing and code reading as tools for dealing with legacy code. This week's participants are Cory Foy (@cory_foy), Dave Thomas (@PragDave), Antonio Cangiano (@acangiano), and Tim Bray (@timbray).What is the relationship between testing and code reading when dealing with legacy code, and how can we use the two processes to

More of the Ruby Mendicant: Gregory Brown's Back with Another Great Project

2009-06-05T07:00:00.004-07:00

For the second interview in this morning's double-header, I've got a quick one with Gregory Brown (@seacreature) about his recently announced second run as the Ruby Mendicant. This is a big opportunity for the ruby community. I hope you'll pitch in a few bucks.RubySpec has been a huge success in the Ruby Community, but it's just one part of a vision that Charlie Nutter put forward at the 2006

Feedzirra and Typhoeus: an Interview with Paul Dix

2009-06-05T06:39:00.002-07:00

With my recent Questions Five Ways series, I've gotten away from my regular interviews. To break that dry spell, I've get a pair great interviews for you. The first is with Paul Dix (@pauldix), the developer of Typhoeus and Feedzirra and budding author (see below). He and I had a good talk about how he builds such great libraries. Read on, I think you'll like it.What kind of hacking do you do

Good Programmers and How to Become One: Questions Five Ways

2009-06-03T06:12:00.002-07:00

The guys behind the Ruby Best Practices Blog are my guests for this installment of Questions Five Ways. I'm a big fan of both the RBP book and the blog, so I was really excited when Gregory and I talked about doing a discussion with the team.Robert Klemme, Gregory Brown (@seacreature), Lakshan Perera (@laktek), and James Britt (@jamesbritt) were the panel that ended up discussing my my question

Communities, Publishers, and Conferences.

2009-06-01T18:56:00.004-07:00

JavaOne [h]as a *very* different feel than that of a Ruby show, obviously :P — Leah SilberReally starting to believe that small, short, regional conferences are the way to go. — Andrew O'BrienI think events of many sizes can be worthwhile -- they just have different profiles and risks/rewards. — David BlackSome of the discussion recently on Twitter has made me think about how we organized

Publishers Can Improve Their Markets and Sell More Books

2009-06-01T18:22:00.005-07:00

As a writer (blogs, magazines, and a book), I've got an unhealthy interest in publishing. A number of my blog posts spring from that attraction. Here's a list to get you started: Books, Publishing, & the CommunityTechnical Publishing Market — A Whole 'Nother Look at ThingsWalMart and the PublisherWresponding to WroxThe Big Box PublisherMom & Pop PublishersA Tale of Two BooksPublishing: the

Code Reading follow-up

2009-05-31T00:05:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to see that my Questions Five Ways posts are starting to draw comments and that the discussions are starting to get some legs of there own. Part of a comment on the Code Reading post really stood out to me:"Your post also prompted me to think about having group code reading sessions, where we can pick up a small open source project or a part of a larger project and then try to

Books, Bits, or both?

2009-05-30T09:50:00.003-07:00

"Heh, I've been working thru the PDF for a while. Now that the book is here, I'm digging a little deeper." —Jim WeirichThis is a pattern I've seen in myself too. I love ebooks because I can carry a bunch of them around on my laptop, search them easily, and grab the occasional snippet from them.On the other hand, I find myself not reading them as seriously as 'real' books. There's something

Questions Five Ways - Static Code Analysis and Testing

2009-05-27T07:36:00.004-07:00

This week in Questions Five Ways I've assembled a group of testers and tool builders to talk about code analysis and code testing. Kevin Rutherford (@kevinrutherford) is the co-author of the upcoming Ruby Refactoring Workbook and the creator of reek. Andy Lester (@petdance) is a longtime proponent of testing in the Perl community. Kay Johansen (@utahkay) is an agile testing guru. Russ Olsen (

Help the One-Click Installer.

2009-05-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

Luis Lavena has been doing a huge amount of pretty thankless work on the One-Click Ruby Installer for windows. But now he's stuck.Luis is a hacker and, by his own admission, not a designer. The project needs a new home and some new web features. (You can get the details at Luis' call for help.)If you'd like to help make a difference in the project, go make a donation at pledgie

Questions Five Ways - Code Reading

2009-05-20T03:25:00.005-07:00

When I came up with the idea of Questions Five Ways, I hoped to create some discussions of lasting value to programmers, posts that would stimulate some meaty discussion. I think this post has fulfilled my vision about as well as anything I could expect.I owe a big 'thank you' to the participants in this discussion: Steve Yegge, James Gray (@JEG2), Rick DeNatale (@RickDeNatale), Diomidis

ruby-prof Post Collection

2009-05-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, back in 2006 to be exact, I started writing about profiling ruby code with ruby-prof. Since then, these have been some of the most read pages on my blog. To make life a little bit easier on everyone, I've written this page to track all of them. Maybe it will even inspire me to write some updates looking at profiling on Ruby 1.9, and the many improvements and new features in

Questions Five Ways - Overview

2009-05-19T07:19:00.007-07:00

Digg thisor Tweet itI think one of the better ideas I've had on this blog is my 'Questions Five Ways' series. For each post, I'll ask a guiding question of five leading hackers, some from the Ruby community and some from outside it. My intent is to build some great resources for everyone who's trying to become a better programmer. If you'd like some more details about the seris, you can take a

About About.com and Being Nice (or not)

2009-05-15T07:59:00.003-07:00

"I used to think of ruby.about.com as just yet another source of dull and uninspired Ruby content designed to churn ad clicks. But that is because I never noticed that they do an evil, Digg-bar style content hijacking on their outbound links. . . ." — Gregory Brown (@seacreature) Gregory Brown is up in arms about the way about.com handles outgoing links, and he's absolutely right. You can go

RubyNation Mini-Interview: Aaron Bedra

2009-05-14T07:48:00.003-07:00

RubyNation (June 11-13 in Reston, VA) is coming up pretty quickly. I'm running a series of mini-interviews with speakers and organizers there to help people get a feel for what RubyNation is going to be like. So far, I've interviewed Hal Fulton, Russ Olsen, and Gray Herter.This time, I'm talking with Aaron Bedra (@abedra). Aaron's talking about rcov and Ruby 1.9. I think it's going to be an

Questions Five Ways - Concurrency

2009-05-13T09:15:00.003-07:00

It's time for the first of my Questions Five Ways posts. This time I approached five programmers that do a lot of work with concurrency. Three of them responded (Tony Arcieri (@bascule), Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s), and MenTaLguY (@mentalguy). Here are the responses they came up with.Please help continue this discussion by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.Which 2-3 languages/

On Ruby Interview with Pat Eyler

2009-05-12T07:25:00.001-07:00

For a bit of a change-up, Sean Carley (@milythael) is running this interview.Pat has become a well known online author in the Ruby community with frequent book reviews, interviews and post on various useful topics. When he asked the community who we would like to see interviewed, I turned the tables on him.You've become a well known blogger in the Ruby community. You're active in organizing the