Tag Archive for 'ruby'

I give up: Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby

Published
by
Josh Kim
on January 27, 2008
in Web Development
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Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

If any single human being has read this book from beginning to end and can explain to me the insanity that is “why”, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee to do so.

I have given up on this book. From the looks of it, I’ve tried three different times over the course of about a year and got to about halfway (I’ve highlighted about halfway through).

Definitely poignant, but horrendously confusing. It definitely is a work of art, but I’m kinda impatient for this type of thing. Sometimes, the really really wonky humor is lost on me, and this, my friend, is a shining example of it.

Time to go back to the Pickaxe book.

Rails & The Hype Cycle

Published
by
Josh Kim
on January 24, 2008
in Web Development
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It’s eerie. I feel it. I feel it in the feed posts I should be getting.

There seems to be less and less feed items about Rails in general. I don’t know… maybe it’s just me… Obie Fernandez says otherwise:

Simply browse the ruby links on programming.reddit.com or the list of over 2000 ruby-related links on DZone to disprove that lie.

But I don’t know… just this gut feeling that I can’t shake that there’s this feeling of meh-ness in the community.

A lot of things have been leading up to this point for me. Working with PHP at work and having Java as the core for StatusFix (although I’m not actually doing Java, but just being this near to it… makes me feel a bit different) is helping me see more and more that there really is no silver bullet, no matter how much I want it.

But that’s merely just an aside. The point of this post comes from Global Nerdy.

Rails Hype Cycle

It’s very likely that we’re in or very near the Trough of Disillusionment stage in the hype cycle when it comes to Rails. Makes a lot of sense, if you ask me. The way I see it, the hype has worn off. And thank goodness it has, because finally, the Rails community can get to work on making awesome things and stop defending or attacking other positions.

As a crazed extremist that has to have his way, I feel like I’ve still got quite a long ways to go in maturing as a developer/manager. New technologies will come and go, and picking the right ones… well, that’s the hard part. It’s almost like… the stock market.

Another Weekend of Code

Published
by
Josh Kim
on December 11, 2007
in Project Ideas
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This past weekend was well spent, inside. Good thing I had enough food to last through the insanity that is freezing rain.

Definitely made some headway into what I wanted to do with the projects I have. Wrote some code, but mostly throwaway. Looked into a lot of the new Rails 2.0 stuff, but only to realize how little Rails I know period. Also added a third to HanMeta, and I hope to keep adding more people as time passes, and… you know… as I get grander ideas. I’m sure I’ll tap on some shoulders as time passes.

And hopefully, soon enough, LLC is in the future. Need a lawyer and an accountant… yikes.

And that’s all the update I have with regards to HanMeta. I have some nice wrist support gloves to aid me in my wrist painness and it feels like they are working.

Woo Hoo!

Published
by
Josh Kim
on December 6, 2007
in Web Development
. Comments

Probably the one of the few times you’ll see me type “2.0″.

jk$ rails -v    
Rails 2.0.1

Now to make some magic happen.

Good thing there’s freezing rain this weekend. Even less reason to move away from the keyboard.

Got the Ball Rolling

Published
by
Josh Kim
on September 5, 2007
in Project Ideas
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The weekend was a blur. It went by too fast.

I made a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where I met up with Amir to get this feed reader project off the ground. We didn’t code all the time, of course. We got a chance to see Superbad while it was still in theaters (when I first saw the previews for this movie, I knew I wanted to see this with the big Manj himself). I finally got a chance to play Metroid Prime 3 as well (which was cool).

I was happy to get the ball rolling. In the end, we didn’t get a lot of code down, but I felt like a lot of the foundations were laid into place… So many things I felt like I took for granted while running through the Depot application using Locomotive…

Deployment of Rails Applications

But alas, this weekend has really pushed me to even more topics I need to quickly learn. Deployment of Rails is an amazingly tricky issue, and I have yet to see a coherent blog post on it. Hence, I bought the eBook Deploying Rails Application. Looks like a very good resource for all things Rails deployment.

Currently, we’re using Dreamhost (because it’s free, since Alex was cool with us using it) with FastCGI and Apache2. I hear it’s not the way to go. Oh the choices run the gamut from Lighthttpd, Mongrel, Pound, Nginx, blah, blah, blah.

Looks like one of the good ways to go is: Pounding Mongrel Light(tpd)ly

Something about Lighttpd rocking Apache, minus load balancing, which is taken care of by Pound…

Yes, I’m still confused. Much to test and learn.

Naming the Darn Thing

I really liked names that had to do with water due to the phrase “river of news”. “Firehose” and “Fire Hydrant” were suggested. We even went the tongue-in-cheek route and tried to name it something to do with garbage… refuse, debris, detritus… Foreign words… Latin words… I mean, this wasn’t the first naming session for this project.

In the end, we decided to not really belabor this issue any longer, and ended up just coming up with a standard way of naming milestones. Of course, this had to be funny, since it would be used internally.

We ended up with: Words that have to do with Christopher Walken sketches on Saturday Night Live.

Yes, I agree. It’s hilarious.

Of course, the first milestone project name had to be called “Cowbell”, from the infamous Blue Oyster Cult sketch involving “Gene Frenkel’s” (Will Ferrel’s) hilarious usage of the cowbell in the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. And who could the producer be? None other than Bruce Dickenson (). Yes. The Bruce Dickenson.

Why is this man so funny? I don’t even know if he’s trying… I wonder if he… talks like that… in real… life.

Or was that too Shatner?

The Date

Heck, I don’t even remember when I got the idea to do something silly like this. But I do remember coming up with a cool looking launch date not based on anything but the fact that it was a cool looking date. (For those of you wonder, that date was 07.07.07)

Regardless of what might have come before, September 1st, 2007 it is. The day when “Cowbell” started.

Time to put my pants on, one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on…