January 30, 2008 @ 12:36 AM by nap · 0 comments
Like my pal bryanl over at smartic.us, I too want to apologize for being a bad blogger lately. I've just been stupid busy with both personal stuff and lotsa client work, which of course is both a blessing and a curse.
In any case, my head is almost back above water and I hope to be back on track writing regular (and hopefully interesting) posts within the next week or two. I've been working on some fun projects and I want to talk about it, really, but at the end of the day I'm just tired and don't know where to begin. I'll figure it out.
In the meantime, if you've got free cycles and some cash in your wallet to burn, pick up a copy of Dave Berube's new book on Ruby Reporting, which was just published by Apress. I served as a technical reviewer on it, which was a really great experience. Even though Dave and I don't see eye to eye on absolutely everything (cue groans about a particular chapter dealing with MS Access integration), it's full of fun Ruby code and unique reporting tips, including examples that interop with Google AdWords, SugarCRM, and PayPal. Congrats man, nice work!
January 29, 2008 @ 09:07 PM by nap · 4 comments
Registration for Railsconf 2008 opened earlier today. According to the site, there will be more advanced-level sessions this year, which is definitely a good thing. Last year was a fantastic experience, but it felt like I was constantly stumbling into sessions where the subject matter was a bit too noob-centric (thank goodness for the IRC peanut gallery).
Of course, that said, as with all conferences, the discussions you get into in the hallways and after hours are usually more beneficial than any session you could ever attend anyway. But still, I'm really hoping sessions are labeled with a suggested experience level this year.
Am I going? Honestly don't know. I'd like to. It's really an amazing thing to see 1500+ Ruby developers all descending upon one location at one time. That spectacle alone is probably worth the price of admission. Plus, the microbrews in Portland are top-notch. I'm guessing it will sell out, so I better make up my mind sooner rather than later. How about you?
January 14, 2008 @ 02:47 PM by nap · 3 comments
The Seacoast NH Ruby SIG (NHRuby) will hold it’s first meeting of 2008 tomorrow, Tuesday January 15th in Portsmouth. I’ll be talking about OpenID and Scott Garman will be doing an overview of some funky stuff he’s doing with ActionMailer. Check out the Wiki for directions and other goodies, as usual. Hope to see you there!
I also want to send a quick congratulatory note to Scott, who launched his Rails-based startup CampaignLever a few weeks ago. CampaignLever is a tool to help grassroots organizations build effective letter writing campaigns. Nice work man!
January 10, 2008 @ 05:33 PM by nap · 6 comments
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have an attribute value that needs to be serialized (stored as YAML) and used within a (YAML) fixture, you can do something like:
FancyWidget:
id: 1
name: FancyWidget
serialized_hash: "<%= {:abc => {:xyz => 'foo'}}.to_yaml %>"
Or, if you want to embed YAML directly you can do:
FancyWidget:
id: 1
name: FancyWidget
serialized_hash: |
---
:abc:
:xyz: foo
This is probably old hat to a lot of you, but I figured I'd doc it here since the solution felt somewhat non-obvious at first. Rails stores serialized attributes in your database this way, so you might run into this if you're using ActiveRecord's serialize method.
January 06, 2008 @ 12:42 PM by nap · 4 comments
I’m calling it now: Coworking spaces are the new startup incubator. No, I’m not talking about shared office space. No way. It’s different:
Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.
The whole concept feels very, very right to me. See, I don’t really want coworkers, just like I don’t really want a full-time ordinary run-of-the-mill 40 hour/week job; I’d rather be sharing a space with 4-10 other self-motivated similarly-minded freelancers, who split their days between client work, personal startuppy ideas, and OSS projects. Especially ones that can hack some mean code, or who have a sick artistic bent.
Of course, you need a critical mass to make something like this work, and people who can commit to participation. Those can be hairy obstacles. Coworking spaces usually develop in larger cities because, hey, they have the ecosystem to support it. The numbers are on their side. San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston and Seattle all have fairly well known coworking spaces. There are a number of entries at pbwiki for small cities, but for the most part, those links are just people who are interested should something become available.
Man, I’m jealous. I want a coworking space in my city. Hrmm.
