Curated
Interview with David Flanagan
Last week I interviewed the author of The Ruby Programming Langauge, David Flanagan. We posted the first part of it today - Five Questions with David Flanagan, Part 1. The second part will go up next week. Enjoy!
American demographic inversion
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
A fascinating read for those who like to think about how our cities evolve.
Program is information.
Its retro, its cool. It’ll come in handy when I need slides on the sameness of code and data in good programming languages.
Via Square America.
Realtime challenges
beyond rest - if publishing data in realtime, XMPP, Comet and scaling HTTP services pique your interest, this thread is an excellent read. Lots of smart people disagreeing here.
Some Grieg
Please to enjoy, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. Brought to you by Artur Rubinstein and the London Symphony.
The rest of the first movement, the second movement and third movement, also for your enjoyment.
Thor and agility
Watching Thor at his agility classes is really interesting. It’s fun to see the dogs constantly looking up to their person to see what jump or obstacle to go to next. Of course, the class is half dog training and half people training.
I’ve noticed a distinct change in Thor’s obediance since he started taking the classes. He’s more receptive to good boy/bad boy commands now. And, of course, he’ll do anything for food!
Here’s some video I took of Courtney and Thor doing their agility thing.
HTTP wrappers with ease
httparty looks really cool. It’s a little library for making writing tiny REST clients easier. From the examples (edited for length):
class Twitter
include HTTParty
base_uri 'twitter.com'
def initialize(user, pass)
self.class.basic_auth user, pass
end
# which can be :friends, :user or :public
# options[:query] can be things like since, since_id, count, etc.
def timeline(which=:friends, options={})
self.class.get("/statuses/#{which}_timeline.xml", options)['statuses'].map { |s| s.to_struct }
end
end
twitter = Twitter.new('bob@example.com', 'bobtime')
twitter.timeline.each do |s|
puts s.user.name, s.text, "#{s.created_at} #{s.id}", ''
end
Great job, John!
Agility course made of people
Wow.
Community anti-patterns
You’ll have to pardon me for linking to Ted Leung twice in short order, but the man is good peoples. This time I’d like to draw your attention to his presentation from OSCON on Open Source Community Antipatterns.
Ted’s talk is full of great observations from his time at OSAF and his ongoing work with the Apache project. Keep in mind that the presentation is on anti-patterns, so most of the slides describe what you don’t want to do.
Not your father's IDE
IDE’s and Dynamic Languages. Ted Leung’s got some useful and insightful things to say about dynamic languages, history, IDEs and the people who use them. While I still think many of the features in a modern IDE are crutches, I hope that what Ted is alluding to becomes a reality.
Golf fail
My golf game is hurting these days. Since I’ve become so familiar with my shots drifting off to the right, I figured I’d finally figure out the correct term for these sorts of shots. Thusly, an illustration to teach myself:
Handsome penance, isn’t it?
Failings of the expert's mind
Why Analytical Applications Fail. Ostensibly, this article is about analytics applications that expect users to know exactly what they want before they start. But to me, the underlying story is of developers who get caught up in their domain and build an application for themselves instead of for their users.
We’ve all fallen into this trap. Whenever a new person joins my team, I always try not to squander their beginner’s mind. Fresh team members can often point out places where the interaction design or domain model need to soften up for those who haven’t lived in the project for months. That said, it requires patience and humility on the part of the existing team.
Practical language kleptomania
Introducing Functor - another library for implementing multiple dispatch/pattern matching in Ruby. This is a great example of what I talked about at OSCON: stealing ideas and applying them to your daily work. I’m particularly impressed with how Dan has applied it to something that isn’t a recursive mathematical function - check out the example of using in a view class.
git.repo.revs.each(...)
Git Iterator - a neat little gizmo for running code against every revision in your Git repository. Yielded this chart showing the growth of the Rails code.
More modules, please
Jay Fields' Thoughts: Ruby: Underuse of Modules. Modules are your best friend, ya’ll. Use ‘em.