Archive: Ruby

A well-designed DSL improves programmer productivity and communication with domain experts. The Ruby community has produced a number of very popular external DSLs—Coffeescript, HAML, SASS, and Cucumber to name a few.

I’ll be giving a talk on Chef at Madison Ruby in Madison, WI, August 23-24.

I’ve joined Mike Nicholaides and Greg Sterndale to form a new consultancy:

Last week someone was looking over my shoulder as I typed a command to run a script. It was something mundane, like ./script/test. He said, “you know, you don’t have to type the dot slash,” and I thought, “Wow, he’s right; I’ve been typing those extra characters for years!”

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.