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At work we’re often pair programming and we have the ideal pairing rig, but one thing wasn’t ideal: I’m the only one who types on the Dvorak keyboard layout.

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout over Christmas break in 2001, figuring that if I were to spend the next 80 years typing, a couple weeks re-learning to touch type would be worth it.

My friends at IndyHall are always talking on HipChat, but I too often forget to open HipChat in my browser and I’m not interested in running their Adobe AIR app. I have been on IRC a lot lately thanks to the Philly Ruby community, so getting my IndyHall hipchats on IRC has been an itch I’ve needed to scratch for awhile.

Three reasons I quit Backblaze, the cloud backup service that lets you back up an unlimited amount of data from a single computer:

Like most well-qualified Ruby developers, recruiters and hiring managers contact me frequently about their open web developer positions. The secret is out that you’ll get more bang for your buck with Ruby on Rails than the Java and .NET web frameworks, so small and large companies alike are clamoring for experienced Ruby developers. I read a year or more ago that there’s a shortage of at least 1,500 Ruby developers in the United States alone. That number has probably doubled or tripled by now. Everyone faces the same frustration: top Ruby talent is hard to come by.

I have a class (Parslet::Slice, to be precise) that inherits from String but needs to be converted back to a string. Which is faster, String#to_s or String()? My hunch is the latter, but I can find out for sure in about a minute:

I’ve had apps on Heroku since 2009, but over the last year or so I’ve been deploying apps there more and more. With the advent of the Cedar stack, there’s less and less you can’t do. Compared to provisioning a virtual server, even with the help of moonshine, you can’t beat heroku create --stack cedar: boom, you have a live site with backups, logging, release management and the running of migrations and asset compilation on deploy. In just another few minutes, you can have SSL, rotating database backups, NewRelic, HopToad, cron, DNS, monitoring, and myriad other addons.