I was fortunate enough to be able to work out attending RailsConf 2012 in Austin, TX.   This was the first time on many years that the conference was not organized by O’Reilly but rather Ruby Central, Inc.

I have to go on record and say I usually avoid cities but the city of Austin is a great place and would not hesitate to return.  The people are friendly and there is so much diversity in the city that there is something new on each corner.  I noticed an abundance of restaurants with so many different types of food.  I can’t say I had a single bad meal during my journey.  Everyone I spoke with about the trip said I had to try the BBQ, and they were right…it was fantastic.

Many of the sessions overfilled the room.  This on in particular exemplifies what I’m talking about.  I bet the fire marshal wasn’t aware of these.  Overall the floors were pretty comfortable.

It was often difficult to decide which sessions to attend, with 3 full-tracks there always seemed to be two talks during the same time slot I wanted to take.  I usually decide which sessions to attend by how applicable they are to current work.

One of my favorite sessions was by Obie Fernandez about using Redis with Rails.  Although the examples of the talk were from his recent startup, they were excellent and showed integrating Redis into a Rails application not to remove ActiveRecord but to compliment it.  Obie discussed a gem he released to help the integration called redis_props along with sample code used in the talk.  The code is clean and concise…great stuff.

Another talk I found personal value in was the Semi Automatic Code Review by Richard Huang.  Richard is the creator and maintainer of the Rails Best Practices gem.  In the talk he discusses another related open source project called Railsbp.com which allows for your code to be reviewed when committing to Github.  The results will be displayed on the Railsbp.com site where you can change the code right there and commit back to your repo.  Very informative details produced from the site, GitHub allows hooks into the service and thoughtfully open sourced.  I wasn’t aware of the site before but now I am using it regularly.

The other talk which I took a lot away from was Digging Deep with ActiveSupport::Notifications by Matt Sanders.  This talk when into great detail with many examples of using notifications in your applications.  It is similar to the event publishing and subscriber model from other platforms such as .NET.  Having spent many years writing .NET applications this talk brought back many memories of this pattern.  The techniques exemplified here I had never used in Rails but do need this functionality on a new project.  

UPDATE (05/03/2012): One talk that was intended to be included here, is from Lori Olson.  Her talk titled, Mobile Rage – What causes it & how to fix it (Confreaks), takes the view of web application use on a mobile device from the user’s perspective and how developers can implement very simple techniques to ease the pain.  I recommend this one highly, good stuff and some tips I was not aware of.  I admit I have some sites that can take advantage of this.  

The final keynote of day one was from a non-Ruby developer, Rich Hickey, which seemed to be out of the ordinary.  Maybe he was there to pull some Ruby developer to the Clojure world.  It appears Rich is trying to convince these two Rubyist that LivingSocial would be better with Clojure.  I wish I could have overheard the conversation.

There were three very large, two-sided, white boards used for companies to post jobs, and they were pretty full of opportunities.  I noticed there were far too many companies attempting to make the next Facebook or Twitter and not enough companies creating really useful applications.  There were exceptions from what I could see, but too few.  I remember the same thing happening around 2000 and then the bubble burst.  Apparently we are not better from this event in history because we have not learned from it.

I finally met face-to-face many friends I only knew from various social networks with lively hallway track discussions.  I think this is the #1 reason to attend conferences.  The materials from the talks are available everywhere and with Confreaks recording all the sessions, you can watch the show later.  You can’t however, experience meeting new friends and seeing old ones without attending.

I recommend every Rails developer attend just one of these events, well worth the time and effort.  The next on is in Portland, OR from April 29 to May 2, 2013.

I also use MarsEdit on my MacBook Air when I travel or even if I am working on the couch in the evenings.  All of the drafts in MarsEdit are saved locally on the computer I am going the writing and once I want to be able to edit from the other computer I end up pushing as a draft to the blog and pulling it down via MarsEdit.  This is a tedious task and has problems.  I don’t know how many times I pushed up a draft and forgot I did a few days later only to work on an old draft locally.

I then had the idea of possibly setting up MarsEdit to save local drafts to Dropbox but there didn’t appear to be an option in MarsEdit to change the location of local storage.

But…there is usually a way to do anything.

The steps below worked great for me, you mileage may vary.  If Dropbox is installed in its default configuration then these instructions should work for you.  I configured my systems with my Mac Pro being the “main” system and my MacBook Air as the secondary.  I had local drafts on my Mac Pro but NOT on my MacBook Air.  If you follow these steps exactly and have local drafts on each system them you will lose data.

Without further ado, follow these steps.  I assume you know how to open a terminal sessions and feel comfortable typing command.

1. Make sure you quit MarsEdit from each system you are going to change the location of local drafts.

2. Find local MarsEdit drafts on your main system – A bit of spelunking reveals where they live in:

~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts

3. Create folder for drafts in Dropbox.

mkdir ~/Dropbox/Library

mkdir ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit

4. Move the local drafts from the main computer to Dropbox, enter these two commands:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MarsEdit

mv LocalDrafts ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts

5. Now let’s fool MarsEdit into thinking nothing has changed.  Symlink the old name to the new location.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts ./LocalDrafts

Now, on each of the other machines start with step 6.

6. Remove the local draft folder (if it’s not empty and delete you will lose data).

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts

7. Time to fool MarsEdit here too. Symlink the old name to the new location.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Library/MarsEdit/LocalDrafts ./LocalDrafts

Repeats steps 6 and 7 for each computer you need to share local drafts.

Once you start up MarsEdit on each of these machines, you should see the same local drafts.  If not, then double-check the steps above.

For me, this interview had it all.  Jason discussed how he and his time started WP Engine but more importantly how they found customers before actually creating the product.  This is so important and seems to be to most difficult part of starting a business.  We developers tend to have an idea for a product, go out and create it and then sit back and wait for customers..who never come because you created something no one wanted.  Jason discusses and idea he had which potential customers did not want to pay for and he dropped it.  WP Engine was customer tested before it was conceived.

Jason found potential customers via LinkedIn:

The first one is, I’ll tell you how we did some tools for consultants, and I’ll tell you how I got a hold of those consultants and how I got them on the phone. It’s exactly what I did, and anyone can do this. You go to LinkedIn, and you search for the type of person that you want to interview. In this case it was WordPress Consultants, but you could say just people who have WordPress in their blog, you could say designers, you could say anything obviously, there’s something you can do on LinkedIn to roughly find them.

Then I simply went through anyone that I could find, and, of course, looked through their information a little to see if it would make sense. And I found people who were professionals, that is, they charge money for their time. Then, I contacted every one of them, which is easy, since, as they are consultants you can find them and their e-mail addresses and they answer it because that’s their sales line. So, it’s very easy to contact people who are professionals in the field. So, I would send an e-mail to each one, and this is what I’d say exactly. I’d say, “Hey, we’re thinking of building these new tools for WordPress.

You are exactly the kind of person who we’d want to use these tools. I would love to get your opinion on what you’re doing because it seems like you’re someone who’s doing something nice in the world and I care what you think. I also know that you’re a consultant and you have an hourly rate, and I’m happy to pay for your time, in fact, you can quote any rate you want since this is just a one off. If you want to charge $200 an hour for the one call, I’m okay with that because I’m not just trying to “pick your brain”, I will compensate you for your valuable time but I really want to know what you think.”

Here’s the result, I had 30 hours of interviews, because I literally logged them so I know. One hundred percent of them agreed to the interview, and one hundred percent of them said “Oh, you don’t have to pay me. This would be fine.” OK? This is why I’m saying anyone could do it. And, by the way, they didn’t really know who I was per se, because I didn’t come through a blog.

Discussion of the growing pains associated with WP Engine are discussed in detail, what worked and what didn’t.  If every business did this we would all learn so much.

This blog is hosted on WP Engine and I have seen those growing pains first hand.  During the early months it seemed this blog was down more than it was up.  Support at the company was what kept me from pulling the plug, fast response and even when they didn’t have an answer they were transparent and explained the issues were not resolved.  I’m sure I have needed more support than most others but each time WP Engine support is there, willing to help and solve the problem. This kept me as a customer.

Other areas which hit home that Jason discussed:

• Partners
• Transparency
• Marketing
• Contracting
• Assistants
• Giving Up

Anyone who has an idea or is struggling getting to the next level should take the time to listen to this interview, maybe even twice.  Take notes and try some things out.  I would call this episode a blueprint for business.

Palliative Symptoms Survey is an application based on the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Survey (ESAS-r) which was developed to assist in the assessment of nine symptoms that are common in palliative care patients: pain, tiredness, drowsiness, nausea, lack of appetite, depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, and wellbeing There is also a blank scale for patient-specific symptoms.

The application is a native iPad application written in Objective-C with a back-end using Ruby on Rails.   Please read a little bit about the project on my company web site.

A web developer today is expected to be an expert in every aspect of their craft and JavaScript is no exception.  Years ago JavaScript seemed to be more of an annoyance, producing those trailers at the bottom of the browser.  This has changed and JavaScript is a first-class citizen as a functional programming language and what seems like an unlimited number of resources covering the language.

I have been doing more and more JavaScript lately, both on the front-end and some node.js on the back end.  I wanted to share some great resources I use for what’s new with regards to JavaScript libraries, projects and general reference.

1. JavaScript Jabber

I am a fan of listening to good podcasts when I take a daily hike.  It gives me a chance to find information about new projects or libraries of code.  I ran into JavaScript Jabber by accident.

This podcast is put together by the same creator of Ruby Rogues, another great podcast but instead talking about Ruby.

Each episode covers a particular topic and goes into detail about the pros and cons of using the technology.  Recent episodes include Backbone.js (Jeremy Ashkenas) and co-hosted by Yehuda Katz (ember.js) and include some lively discussion between the two about Backbone.js vs. Ember.js and some design decisions made by the two frameworks.

Other episodes cover topics such as JavaScript Objects and Asynchronous Programming.  Every episode to date has been filled with great bits of information and a wealth of other things to checkout.  Be sure to check out the show notes from each show with links to things mentioned on the show.

2. The JavaScript Show

The JavaScript Show is a podcast which runs down the weekly happenings in the JavaScript community, similar to JavaScript Weekly but in obvious audio format.  Lots of news and opinion here from hosts Jason Seifer and Peter Cooper.

This show is varies from JavaScript Jabber as it focuses more on new projects, updates to existing projects and all-around what’s happening this week in JavaScript land.

If you want to get the “Nightly News” version of what’s happening with JavaScript, this is your source.

3. JavaScript Weekly

This is a weekly newsletter put out by Peter Cooper.  JavaScript Weekly is a nice collection of what is going on in the JavaScript community; new projects, updated projects, news, videos, podcasts and conference information.  It probably overlaps a bit with The JavaScript Show since Peter Cooper does both but probably enough different to make it worth it.  If you aren’t into podcasts then this one is definitely a good resource.

There is also a Twitter account where various other updates are published.

If you don’t have time to scour the web for JavaScript news, this weekly delivery to your inbox can help sort it out and keep you up-to-date.

4. Mozilla JavaScript Reference

Mozilla is THE place for information regarding JavaScript.   There is so much detail on the site it is easy to get overwhelmed, so #4 is really 4 picks in one.

Re-introduction to JavaScript is a resource for those developers who may have some exposure to the language but maybe where not steered down the right path or just don’t remember the basics.

The Mozilla master index of their JavaScript resources is a great place to bookmark and return to later.  This includes links to what is new in JavaScript versions, language guide, mailing lists and tools.

The master list includes the JavaScript Guide, which is a how-to manual about the JavaScript language itself.  Great for just starting out or referring back when you’re just not sure.

The AJAX Tutorial takes a look at how to get started with AJAX requests, what they are and the various places to use them.  This is one of the best introductions I have seen as it just refers to JavaScript and a bit of HTML with no other language mixed in to add to the confusion.

UPDATE: Reader Don Smith points out by including “mdn” (no quotes) when searching Google for JavaScript reference information, you will get the best results from the Mozilla resources.  I tried several searches and he is right, the good stuff comes to the top.  Also remember you can limit the searches to this site specifically by preceding searches with “mdn:”.

5. Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript Resources

When I think of JavaScript, Douglas Crockford is one the names that immediately comes to mind.  If you haven’t heard of him, you may have heard of his book – JavaScript : The Good Parts.   His web site dedicated to JavaScript is a nice list of resources to his work as well as others.

6. Advanced Topics in Web Development – Fall 2011

For those who may want a bit more classroom type training but can’t get away, iTunes University has a free course covering lots of great stuff about advanced web development which equates to JavaScript.  It looks like there are 19 sessions up and possibly some more coming since #19 is jQuery, part 1.  Even if there are only the 19 episodes, there is lots of great content.

7. Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners

Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners is a book about JavaScript patterns, it has beginners in its title but most beginning developers don’t know what a pattern is.  Heck, most experienced developers haven’t studied them enough to be fluent in pattern speak.  This is a great book for anyone to better understand patterns and has the JavaScript twist to them.

Finally

I hope people find this list useful.  I tried to keep my narration to a minimum since you can go to the sites to read the real details.  I just wanted to share some useful links I use and found after filtering through tons of Google searches.

My coworker Damian Edwards and I hypothesize that there is another kind of developer than the ones we meet all the time. We call them Dark Matter Developers. They don’t read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don’t go to user groups, they don’t tweet or facebook, and you you don’t often see them at large conferences. Where are these dark matter developers online?

Scott points out where he thinks these developers are:

Where are the dark matter developers? Probably getting work done. Maybe using ASP.NET 1.1 at a local municipality or small office. Maybe working at a bottling plant in Mexico in VB6. Perhaps they are writing PHP calendar applications at a large chip manufacturer.*

Personally, I know quite a few of these developers and I prod them to not be so introverted, get out to meet ups, blog or at least join and use Twitter.  Maybe these folks have it right, maybe we should just get things done and spend the rest of the time focused on things that are more important to us.  I think they could be right, we spend our time on things we are passionate about, we work because we have to…we need to provide for our families.

To me, the difference between the Dark Matter Developers and those like Scott, is the passion.  Not everyone is passionate about the work they do, the work on and move on to things they like better.  I have been passionate about computers for as long as I can remember, devouring technology in every waking hour because it fascinates me.  I believe this is what separates these two distinct types of developers.

I am a Dark Matter Home Owner.  I hate doing maintenance around the house; lawn mowing, raking, building and painting.  I have better things to do with my time and fixing a leaky gutter is not it.  I would rather read a book on algorithms and pay someone to mow my lawn..that’s just I roll.

The only solution I could reliably make work was to open up Activity Monitor and kill the pow process manually.  It worked..until the next time and I would have to do it again and again.  It seemed like I was doing this many times a day.

It turned out this was a bug reported to the development team and is a confirmed issue.  The cause of the problem is determined to be the dns resolver, ndns.    A pre-release version, 0.4.0-pre is reported to resolve the issue.  Install it with the command:

curl get.pow.cx | VERSION=0.4.0-pre sh

I did this and have not had to manually restart pow once.  I’m not sure why the official release has not been updated to include the fix to this issue which seems to effect many users.