On August, 21st of 2010, at RS on Rails 2010, I and Robson Mendonça gave a talk about a game development framework for Ruby called Chingu. Our main goal with this talk was to show that you can have fun with pure Ruby without riding Rails. I believe we successfully achieved that!

For those who might have interest, below are our slides (Portuguese only).  Our game’s source code you can find at zukunftsalick’s github.

Ah, one more thing: On September, 12th, I and Carlos Villela will be giving a talk at qCon São Paulo. We’ll be presenting “Especificações de Fora pra Dentro Usando BDD e Selenium 2” roughly translated to “Specifications from outside-in using BDD and Selenium 2″. See you guys there!

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I have something to confess:  I’m an information addicted. I’m always reading books, checking out news, following a few hundred blogs, following another few hundred people on twitter and the list just goes on and on. I bet you do the same.

First of all, this is not about how to just pass over your next university exams but how to keep yourself updated or learn something with all the information we are throw everyday. It’s not possible (for me at least) to keep track from everything I read. People like me reads hundreds of information sources, mostly online. Besides that we also read books, attend conferences, meet new people, etc. We are literally bloated by information from everywhere.

how can we manage to digest this huge amount of information we face everyday ?

We all know there’s no unique answer for that question. Everybody has a different approach when it comes to learn something. Some people prefer to take notes while reading, some people prefer to record audio snippets, some people like to create songs that resemble the information, (your method here). As you might think, I happen to have my own technique (probably not only mine) and it’s being very useful to me.

I read somewhere else a good analogy: we have two “databases” in our brain. One is the short-term memory database and the other is the long-term one.  When we read something, every piece of information goes to our short-term memory which is something like a “heap” of unclassified information . As this “database” isn’t classified, our brain doesn’t know if the information is useful or not.  Later on, it can be even 10 minutes, when we try to recall some information from it, we may not be able to easily do it because isn’t classified yet. But no worries : how many times happened to you that you remembered something just a few hours later while doing something else? That happens because our searching process is asynchronous.

Ok, our information searching process is asynchronous, so what ? It literally means, your brain is still learning some subject even after you stopped thinking about it. It’s like dispatching a background process. The problem is you need to constantly remember that subject in order to transfer it to your long-term memory.

You can achieve that by keeping a sort of learning log. I’ve tried many tools to help me keeping track of what I want to learn. For instance, a simple text editor, an iphone app. You just need to ensure you have quick and easy access to it….As I’m a very moody person I keep changing, right now, for instance, I’m using a folder of my browser’s favorites bar which I sync across my computers. Sometimes I also use the favorites features from twitter. As I’m always checking them, I keep remembering the subjects I have demonstrated interest. Most of this links are shortcuts to blog posts, interviews, podcasts, which I may have read/listened only once. But just the fact I’m recalling the title, it helps me to internally recall the content I read before from that source. In case I don’t remember what’s the content is about I just go there and skim over the text so I get the general idea. If even doing so, I don’t understand the content, then I mark it to read it later using a javascript snippet.

What happens when my learning log stack is getting excessively big ? Just use your common sense! If you get to the point where you always need to recall every item in your list, something is wrong! So, how many items should you have in your list? It may vary from person to person. In my case I found 10 to be a good size. It doesn’t mean I need to first learn all 10 items and them move to the next 10 items. Some items can be in your list for a relatively long time, it’s strongly dependent on how complex is the subject and how fast you can learn.

Defining when you “learned” something is very subjective. In my opinion, you can’t know everything. My “learned” definition is when I get to the point where I can explain the subject to someone else and they properly understand it. Having a time constraint can help too, like imposing yourself a 15 days limit for the items in your list.

Resources used:

• Learning log (official way) http://www.csudh.edu/titlev/learninglog.htm
• Read it later http://readitlaterlist.com/

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Some days ago I was asked how the dispatcher works in ruby and I was caught in surprise I didn’t know how to explain the method dispatching in the language we love (Ruby). That question was kept still in my mind for a few days but while listening to some workmates discussing about singleton classes in ruby the answer came to my mind in a blink of eyes reminding me from a university class which I had a long time ago about how method dispatching works in dynamic languages like Ruby.

So with that information in mind and some googling to confirm it I came out with a simple explanation of how the dispatching works in Ruby and decided it’s worth sharing you.

Essentially for each method call in ruby, the language interpreter checks in the inheritance hierarchy of the classes of the receiver (in our case “my_string“) to determine which method should be executed.

An example:

  my_string = Hash.new # => {}
  my_string.size  # => 0

The code above is pretty simple but what’s important is happening beneath of it. The language interpreter is assigning the variable “my_string” with an instance of the Hash class then it’s calling the method “size”.

The Hash class is where our interpreter will start searching for the “size” method, if the interpreter doesn’t find the method in the Hash class, it’ll continue to search in the Hash parent class, which in our case (Ruby) is the topmost class . It can be the case the interpreter don’t find the method “size”, so it’ll throw a “method missing” exception. In our example, the Hash class contains the “size” method and successfully returns.

If you want to know how MRI’s (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) implements method dispatch, I recommend you to take a look in this blog post by Patrick Farley, where he explains the Ruby source code responsible for handling method dispatch.

For even further information on this matter there is this huge and excelent post from Russ Olsen, author of the book Design Patterns in Ruby.

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What prevents an application, like Twitter,  of acquiring more and more users besides the geek users? Even within my circle of friends and acquaintances that work/study with IT, when I talk about I’ m a Twitter user, I need to repeat uncountable times what Twitter is about  and I usually explain to them according to what twitter advertise as their goal (Not a micro blogging tool, What are you doing?). In 90% of the cases, they say they heard about it but don’t know what´s its purpose, in other words, they don´t know how they could use twitter for their benefit. ”Why would I tell ´followers´ what I am doing ?¨ is the most asked question after  my explanation.  It means Twitter´s initial goal failed to instigate the user to create a new need, but why ?

As seen in the graph, there´s  a steep  that divides Early adopter users from the mainstream users. I believe that this gap,  which is always  the final “test” to any application to become popular, is becoming even steeper between  the Early Adopter user (the ones who adopt new technologies before the vast majority of people) and the mainstream user due the fact  most of the services around the web, like twitter,  being targeted (mostly due to bad advertisement) to Early Adopters users. Like I said before, it happens that for mainstream users the reason for what they would use something needs to be clearly written in giant letters with neon lights otherwise they won´t buy  your idea by just “giving a try”.

I myself, being an early adopter user, believe we are living in some kind of technological bubble and even though we see so many applications doing success around there, most of them are not even close of what they could reach because they are kept restricted to the geek world. There’s a lot of things that could be achieved. In my opinion, before saturating the market with thousands of applications that  deliver the same product in different designs, we could stop being so selfish and besides developing applications we should care about how we are going to sell our idea and how to create the need inside the user´s mind.

However, create focusing the real need of the final user isn’ t a easy task. We, developers, having the bad habit of programming to ourselves, solving our own problems and satisfying our selfish needs doesn´t help much either. Because of that, we live in this technological bubble where we create services/products to impress our friends with all our freak techniques and for what ? Just to be to be used by ourselves. But how to break the bubble ? How to identify the needs of the mainstream users ? It’s really hard to give final answers to these questions, however, I believe the solution is start paying attention to our non-geek friends (if you don´t have non-geek friends, can be your mom)  in their day-to-day and trying to assume the mainstream user’s role. 

Users don´t like to take risk. They are very different from people like me and probably you. They don´t care about 99% of the things we care about,  so pay attention to the people around you, notice how they interact with the computer as well their reactions behind it. One user screwing his face in front of the computer can be the best time to ask him to find out what’ s wrong and how he think it might be possible to improve.

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Fact: programmers are one of the laziest creatures on earth and when it comes to ruby programmers, like me, the problem is even worse. We don´t like to spend more than 5 minutes cooking something while we could be doing something more important like chatting with your friends on freenode.

After spending more time than I wanted in the kitchen, I came with this recipe that is easily modifiable and IMHO it´s delicious and nutritive. So, here´s what you need:

• olives, I´m using french style olives, but you can use any other one
• balsamic vinegar, preferably an original one from Modena, Italy
• a good quality extra virgin olive oil
• honey
• cheese, you can choose, but I strongly recommend using goat cheese, camembert or brie
• cherry tomatoes
• vegetables, I´m using lettuce and its variants, but  you can put any other vegetable you like

First, start slicing the vegetables in way you can eat without cutting them.

Then pour honey over the vegetables like drawing lines. Be careful not to add too much honey otherwise will be more a dessert rather than a salad.

Cut the cheese in cubes and add it over the salad. As I´m using goat cheese which is a little bit too strong for my taste, I added less cheese and due to its form factor, I´m using slices of it

Now you add about 1.5 level tablespoons (15ml) of balsamic vinegar over the salad.

The lasts steps are no mistery: you add olives, cherry tomatoes, dress the salad with the extra virgin olive oil and that´s pretty much of it.

Now the best part: you can try your very new salad ! Bon Appétit

Just in case you´re wondering about which olive oil and balsamic vinegar I used, here are them:

Venta Barón, from Spain

Ponti, from Italy

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