On Ruby

Reviewing Annual Reviews

2012-11-01T13:10:00.002-07:00

Almost everyone seems to hate end of year performance reviews. Done correctly though, they could be celebrations of your accomplishments. What would it take to make them more exciting, more interesting, or at least less painful? How about this for an annual review? Maybe we're not going to see videos with voice-over announcers, screaming fans, or a pulsating soundtrack. Surely we can do

2012-06-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is a book that I wish was on my son's required reading list. Not that his code is hard to read (for someone in their first programming class), but that there are all kinds of bad habits that wouldn't need to be broken if he and his classmates spent some time learning what good code looks like before they started to write their own. The Art of Readable Code from O'Reilly is a quick, easy

The Linux Command Line

2012-06-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

As a long-time, professional Unix/Linux sysadmin, I spend a lot of time on the commandline. I've grown pretty familiar with it, but I often find that junior teammates don't have the same familiarity. They often grew up in a world of windows and GUIs. That means I spend a lot of time helping them learn the ropes. When I saw that No Starch Press had published The Linux Command Line, I wanted

The Art of R: interview and mini-review

2012-02-16T11:54:00.002-07:00

The Art of R Programming is an approachable guide to the R programming language. While tutorial in nature, it should also serve as a reference. Author Norman Matloff comes from an academic background, and this shows through in the text. His writing is formal, well organized, and tends toward a pedagogical style. This is not a breezy, conversational book. Matloff approaches R from a

Protocol Buffers - Brian Palmer's Take

2011-04-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here's another in my continuing series of Ruby Protocol Buffers posts. This time, I've got an interview with Brian Palmer.(I interviewed Brian about his participation in a 'Programming Death Match' back in 2006.) While working at Mozy, Brian worked with Protocol Buffers, and now maintains the ruby-protocol-buffer. He left Mozy last September, and is now working at a startup called Instructure

Protocol Buffers - BJ Neilsen's Take

2011-03-31T08:35:00.005-07:00

BJ Neilsen (@localshred or at github) is a member of my local Ruby Brigade, and he's hacking with/on Protocol Buffers with Ruby — oh, and he's a fan of Real Salt Lake too. He works for a Provo, Utah based startup MoneyDesktop. Where he helped them transition away from a less-than-desirable PHP solution to Rails. They now enjoy an entirely new service-architecture driven by Ruby (and Protobuf).

Ruby and Protocol Buffers, Take One and a Half

2011-03-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

In a comment on my previous post on Protocol Buffers, Clayton O'Neill recommended trying out the java protobuf library with jruby. I'll get to that eventually, but his comment made me wonder how jruby and rubinius would do with this little test. I fired up rvm and looped through my installed versions. Here are the results: ruby 1.8.7 (2010-08-16 patchlevel 302) [i686-linux] real 3m11.857s user

Ruby and Protocol Buffers, Take One

2011-03-24T14:20:00.001-07:00

At work, we're moving from XML to protocol buffers. While we're mostly a Java shop, the operations/sysadmin team I'm on does a lot of Ruby. I was interested in how we might use the same technology for some of our stuff. After a bit of looking, I found two libraries that looked mature enough to investigate: ruby-protobuf ruby-protocol-buffers ruby-protobuf, by MATSUYAMA Kengo (@macks_jp), was

Review - Eloquent Ruby

2011-03-23T07:40:00.001-07:00

The system management/administration team that I work on is starting to do more scripting and tool building. That means bringing a bunch of people up to speed on Ruby. We're using a combination of the Pickaxe Book and pair programming/mentoring to help bootstrap people. So far it's been working pretty well. Watching everyone else reading and learning made me want to get in on the action.

Reading List Update 9/8/2010

2010-09-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

The recent news that GDB now supports D makes The D Programming Language jump up a notch or two on my reading list. I've finished 52 Loaves: One Man's Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust, it was a fun read. I really identified with his trip to the French monastery. It seemed like a great climax to his year, with the perfect denouement as he came home to bake his final

My Reading List on 8/31/2010

2010-08-31T09:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Prentice Hall and Addison-Weseley giving me three new books, my reading list has bulked back up. Here's what I'm working through at the moment: The Freebies UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition) — I'm really excited about this one, I've loved the first three editions, and this looks like a really solid revamping of a classic in the Sys Admin field. The D

Ruby|Web Interview with Pat Maddox

2010-08-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, if I'm going to post about GoGaRuCo today, I should also spend some time on Ruby|Web, the latest regional conference from Mike Moore (@blowmage) and friends — truth in advertising, I'm a volunteer on the board for Ruby|Web, so I might be a bit biased. Just so my biases don't show too much, I asked Pat Maddox(@patmaddox) to answer a few questions for me. Of course, he's a speaker at Ruby|Web

GoGaRuCo 2010: mini-interview with Ilya Grigorik

2010-08-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

Ilya Grigorik (@igrigorik) is another GoGaRuCo speaker who's kindly agreed to sit down and work through a short interview with me. Hopefully this gives you taste of what you'll be missing if you're not going to the Bay Area's regional Ruby conference. Machine Learning and Ruby don't leap to mind as a common pairing. Why is machine learning important to Rubyists? Ilya I don't think the topic of

GoGaRuCo 2010: mini-interview with Josh Susser

2010-08-19T07:33:00.002-07:00

GoGaRuCo is just around the corner (Sep 17-18), and it looks like it's going to be a great conference again this year. I wanted to touch base with Josh Susser (@joshsusser) again to see what was going to set this year apart. He was kind enough to answer a few questions. If you live in the Bay Area and haven't already decided to hit GoGaRuCo, what are you waiting for? This is your second time

Lone Star Ruby Conf Speaker Interview: Jesse Wolgamott

2010-07-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Today's a twofer for the Lone Star Ruby Conference. My third interview (second today) is with Jesse Wolgamott (@jwo) who's presenting "Battle of NoSQL stars: Amazon's SDB vs Mongoid vs CouchDB vs RavenDB ". Jesse shares some thoughts about NoSQL and the conference. NoSQL looks like it's gaining momentum. Why should Rubyists be interested in the topic? Jesse Once you reach the point in

Lone Star Ruby Conf Speaker Interview: Nephi Johnson

2010-07-16T11:03:00.001-07:00

Okay, time for a second interview with a Lone Star Ruby Conference speaker. This time, Nephi Johnson (@d0c_s4vage) talks a bit about his presentation — "Less-Dumb Fuzzing and Ruby Metaprogramming". Fuzzing isn't always well understood. Can you describe fuzzing, and tell us what situations it's a good fit for? Nephi Fuzzing is a term used to describe the process of feeding an application

LSRC Speaker Interview with David Copeland

2010-07-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

With the Lone Star Ruby Conference just over a month away, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to some of the presenters. David Copeland (@davetron5000) is giving a talk about a topic that resonated with me, so I sent off an email to find out more about what he thought would make his presentation and the conference worthwhile. I've never been a big 'web app' kind of guy, so I was excited

Ruby|Web Interview

2010-07-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Mike Moore, one of the big movers behind MountainWest RubyConf and the UtahValley.rb is getting the ball moving for another Ruby-centric conference —Ruby|Web. He was kind enough to sit down with me and share his thoughts about Regional Ruby Conferences and how Ruby|Web fits into that space. SLC already has MWRC, why another Ruby (ok, Ruby+) conference? Mike Moore There are so many great

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