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Ruby Batteries Included

Daniel Huckstep — 01 May 13 10:00 MDT

At the beginning of April 2013, MWRC ensued in Salt Lake City, Utah. I rolled the dice and submitted a talk, not thinking that they'd pick it. Announcements started rolling out on the twitter, and boom, there it was.

Speaking at MWRC 2013: @darkhelmetlive on "Ruby Batteries Included". mtnwestrubyconf.org/2013/ruby-sess…
— MtnWest RubyConf (@mwrc) January 24, 2013

Well, the conference came and went, and I had a great time. Lots of great speakers, met lots of great people, and learned lots of great stuff.

The videos are coming out now, and mine is available. Check it out!

If videos aren't your thing, check out the slides.

Thanks for watching, reading, and thanks to everybody who came and watched.

How Do I RDoc? Documenting Ruby

Daniel Huckstep — 05 Apr 13 10:00 MDT

Yesterday I did a talk at Mountain West Ruby Conf 2013 all about the Ruby Standard Library.

The basic premise is you should be looking to the standard library first, before running to RubyGems.org and GitHub for new code. If all you need is a hammer, you don't need to buy the hardware store.

Where are the docs?

The problem is that sometimes, the standard library doesn't have the documentation you might want. Maybe it's not that great of an example, maybe it's missing completely. Maybe it's almost perfect, but just needs that one last sentence to button it up.

How do I Ruby?

The solution is you. Ruby is open source, and they love getting pull requests for documentation updates.

How do you add docs to Ruby? Let's see...

Get yours and I'll get mine!

First, go to the GitHub repo and fork it for yourself. Clone the repo to your local machine.

If it ain't broke...

In your new ruby directory, run autoconf to generate the configure script, then run ./configure. Now run make rdoc-coverage. This will tell you how much documentation coverage ruby has. It will also give you a list of things that don't have documentation (just scroll up). Find something that needs docs, and go to town!

If it actually doesn't need documentation (methods that start with _ for example probably don't need rdoc documentation), you can comment with :nodoc:.

Big ups to Ryan Davis for help with these steps!

See your progress

If you want to see what your docs will look like online, that's pretty easy too. Run rdoc path/to/file.{rb,c} -o html -O and you'll get an html directory with stuff. Open up html/index.html in your browser, and you can see how things look.

If you are working on a big file, you can run rdoc -C path/to/file.{rb,c} to get a coverage report for the individual file, to see what you need to work on next.

Push it real good

Once you've got some documentation written, commit your changes to a branch. Push that branch up to GitHub and make a pull request.

BOOM.

Fin

Every little bit of documentation helps folks. If you are using something, and you're learning about it, put that knowledge into documentation if those docs are lacking. You're helping everybody.

manbearpig: Mutation Testing for Go

Daniel Huckstep — 11 Mar 13 10:00 MDT

Mutation testing isn't about testing your code, but about improving your tests.

What happens is the testing tool looks through your source code for instances of some known thing. This usually something easily tweaked, like ==. For each instance, it changes it to some opposite value that makes sense. In the case of ==, we can change it to !=. For each single change it makes, it runs the tests. The idea is that the tests should fail. If they don't, you might want to consider writing more tests to cover the cases the mutation exposed. After a test run, the mutation is reset, so as to not taint subsequent mutations.

For my book Go, The Standard Library I wrote an example to show off how you can alter a Go AST. I've reworked the example and packaged up an an application called manbearpig.

manbearpig

Get start by installing manbearpig

go get github.com/darkhelmet/manbearpig

Now you can run it on a standard library to see it in action.

manbearpig -import crypto/sha256 -mutation ==

You can see that it switches == to !=, and that the tests break, as they should.

Run manbearpig -list to see the list of available mutations.

Fin

Run this on your own package to see where your tests are lacking.

Make Your Own Celluloid

Daniel Huckstep — 11 Feb 13 10:00 MST

Oh look, a post on ruby concurrency. LOLZ THREADS.

Anyway, let's get past the lolz about ruby and threads and just run this on JRuby okay?

Celluloid

Celluloid is a ruby library to make concurrency easy. It gives you a nice object oriented interface to the concurrent patterns it provides. We're going to look at two specific interfaces: Actors and Futures.

Before we begin, let me say I love Celluloid. I'm just doing this to see how much basic functionality I can get with very little code. You probably shouldn't use any of the code I post here in production, but it's a good learning experience. Just use Celluloid if you need concurrency.

Our Interface

We want to be able to mix in a module and get two methods: async and future.

The async method returns something that sends messages to the instance asynchronously, so calling object.async.long_running_method will return immediately and long_running_method will execute in another thread.

The future method returns something that sends messages it receives to the instance and immediately returns a Future. This Future has one method, value, which will return the return value of the message send when it's ready, possibly blocking until it is ready.

We'll call our gem lol_concurrency

The Async Interface

Let's do the async method first. We'll put everything in the LolConcurrency::Actor module, which you include into your class. We do a fancy dance to memoize the @async variable in a threadsafe manner (I think that should be threadsafe...), and then all the real work is done in the LolConcurrency::Actor::Async class. It forwards respond_to? to the underlying instance, and then method_missing saves everything and sends it to the mailbox (using the Queue class, which is threadsafe). A loop in another thread pops from the mailbox and executes the methods.

Boom.

The Future Interface

The future method is very similar. We do the same dance to cache the Factory as I've called it, respond_to? still gets forwarded, but there's no mailbox. When a message gets sent and hits method_missing, we make a SizedQueue able to hold a single value. The actual work gets done in a new thread and the return value shovelled into the queue. We then return a new Future with the queue. The Future then does the dance to cache the value it pops from the queue when you want the value. The initial call to value might be slow (maybe you're making an HTTP request), but will be instantaneous afterwards since the value is cached.

All Done

That's pretty much it. Wrapping up threads in some safe interface like this can really save you a bunch of headaches. Oh sure, you can still shoot yourself in the foot, doing mutations to things that aren't thread safe. These two modules just give you a nice way to deal with concurrent things without spending too many brain cycles on it.

Looking at this tested code after the fact, it's probably fine to use, even in production, as long as it's for super simple things. I'll still probably stick with Celluloid anyway. It gives you a ton of other great features to handle actor lifecycles (lol exceptions) and is generally better thought out and designed than this little gem I hacked up in a few hours.

That's it for now, happy threading!

Basecamp Next Todo Migrator

Daniel Huckstep — 24 Jan 13 10:00 MST

I had this conversation on Twitter yesterday.

That's fine. 37Signals is known for saying no to things in the interest of a better product. A migrator for BCX isn't exactly something that would add enough value to the product to warrant spending their time on it.

It's cool.

Don't worry, I got this

I built one. It only took a couple hours to throw together and clean up. It's super basic, but it did the job for me. It handles todolists with their todos and comments, but no attachments.

It's not my best code, but whatever it works. The rescue/retry stuff was a last minute eye roller because I got an SSL error of sorts. Just keep an eye on it if it gets out of hand. Completed lists are migrated as well, so you have a record of that stuff too.

It migrated my 800+ todos in my Basecamp Next project to Basecamp Personal in about 24 minutes. Now I can save some bucks in the long run.

Happy migrating!

RubyConf Mission Complete

Daniel Huckstep — 08 Nov 12 10:00 MST

RubyConf 2012 is at an end, and what a time it was. This was my first conference, and it was all thanks to my employer Yardstick. If it wasn’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have been able to come, learn so much, and meet so many great people.

My mission was to thank as many people as possible, in person. Open source is somewhat of a thankless job. Lots of people using your code or what have you, and never receiving thanks for it.

While I didn’t get to meet and thank everybody I wanted to, I did get to quite a few of you. In no particular order…

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

Matz is the reason we were all there. In 1993, Matz started working on what would become ruby. In December of 1995 it was first released. Ruby 1.8 came out in 2003.

Currently, he works full time on ruby for Heroku. Basically, he gets to do what he loves, and Heroku signs the cheques.

Domo arigato Matsumoto-san. Ruby makes many people’s lives better, and the world is a better place for having it. It was a pleasure meeting you and hearing your keynote. I hope we meet again in the future.

Aaron “Tenderlove” Patterson

Aaron is a beacon of positivity in the ruby community. He’s always wearing a smile and I’m pretty sure the only reason he stops working is because his cat is sitting on his keyboard.

He works for AT&T on open source, similar to Matz. He works on rails-core and ruby-core, and has an impressive array of project on Github. Chances are you’ve run code he’s written.

Follow him on Twitter and give him a hug.

Thanks Aaron for all the work you do, code you write, knowledge you drop on us on your blog, and your positive attitude. It makes the community better, and encourages us all to be better.

Jim Weirich

You’ve used Jim Weirich’s code. Yes you have. You know rake? Yeah, that was Jim. He also made the builder gem for doing XML generation. flexmock is another one of his that you might use.

He always gives great presentations at conferences (go watch the videos), and is never greedy when it comes to knowledge and source code.

These two tweets pretty much cover it.

Thanks Jim for the great talk, the hug, and all the work you’ve done and given to the ruby community. It wouldn’t be the same without you.

Thank Jim yourself on his Twitter or on his blog. See what other code he’s shared on his Github.

Charles Nutter, Tom Enebo, Nick Sieger

Charlie (center), Tom (left) and Nick (below with Corey Haines) are a few of the JRuby core developers. You know, that popular ruby implementation on the JVM with some crazy performance numbers? Yeah that one. Without these smart people on the JRuby team (and also Ola Bini who wasn’t present at RubyConf), JRuby would probably just be old abandoned project not worth your time.

Because of their hard work, JRuby is a force to reckoned with. Charles is also involved with JVM optimizations (I believe he was on two JSR committees), and puts out a lot of code to help get people up and running on JRuby.

Thanks for all the hard work Charles, Tom, Nick (and Ola!). JRuby is an awesome positive project in the ruby community, and lots of people depend on it. You guys just keep making it better.

Thank Charles on Twitter or his blog and get his code on Github.

Find Tom on Twitter, Github or on his blog.

Nick Sieger is also on Twitter, Github and has a blog.

Ola Bini has Twitter, Github, and a blog.

Corey Haines

Corey (right, Nick Sieger left), like Aaron, is pure positivity. I’m convinced he can’t form a frown, but Sarah Gray assured me he does frown, but it’s only at poorly designed code.

As an advocate of the “software craftsmanship” movement, he started Code Retreat. These are day long practice sessions to help software developers hone their craft with others.

He’s all about becoming better, together.

Thanks Corey. Your positivity is incredibly valuable, and the ruby community is lucky to have you. Your desire to become better and help us become better as a group is something the ruby community has and others don’t. That’s actually a little sad. Everybody community should have Corey Haines.

You can find Corey on Twitter, Github, and his website.

Coby Randquist

Coby isn’t pumping out rubygems or ruby-core optimizations, so what does he do? You might not be familiar with the name, because Coby is behind the scenes. Specifically Confreaks.

All those videos that are online from ruby and other conferences for free. Coby’s company produces those. At RubyConf he and his crew were running around between 4 different rooms, recording and live streaming all the talks on Justin.tv.

It took a while for me to talk to Coby and thank him, because he was always on his game and making sure things were working. If you get the chance, shake his hand and give him the props he deserves.

Thanks Coby for all the videos! Thank him yourself on Twitter and his blog.

Bryan Helmkamp

Bryan developed the rack-bug gem which gives you insight into your application when things just aren’t working the way they’re supposed to.

More recently, he founded Code Climate which does hosted software metrics for ruby applications. It’s a business so you’ll pay for private projects, but for all your open source stuff it’s nice and free. Head over to the Explore page to see some of those projects and add your own.

The similarity between these two projects is that they aren’t for Bryan; they’re for us. They help us debug our software and make it better. They encourage better code and generally improve the ruby community. Thanks Bryan!

Find him on Github and Twitter.

Chris Hunt

Chris Hunt gave a great talk on Service Oriented Architecture at Square. One of the best parts was all the links to public Github repositories that Square has released.

Chris Hunt and Square are shipping like bosses, and it’s making our community better. Things like cane and fdoc are fantastic. Outside of the ruby community they have Android/Java projects.

They are giving it all back. Thanks Chris, and thanks Square!

Find Chris on Twitter, at his website, and on Github.

Loren Segal

Write documentation for your code. Pretty please? If you don’t, Loren Segal will find you. He’s Canadian though, so he’ll probably just ask you nicely if you could write docs. I think your kneecaps are safe.

He’s the brains behind the yard gem for documenting your ruby code. It powers http://rdoc.info/ which is where I go for all my documentation needs.

When I thanked Loren, he gave this sigh of relief. You should thank him too, and you should probably use yard to document your ruby code. He also gave a talk at RubyConf, so check out the video when it’s up. Thanks Loren!

He can be found on Twitter, Github, and gnuu.org.

Mike Perham

Mike is all about concurrency on ruby. Some of his work includes sidekiq, girl_friday, and rack-fiber_pool. Sidekiq is a job queue similar to Resque but instead of processes it uses threads. girl_friday gives you an in-process job queue, and rack-fiber_pool runs requests in ruby fibers, which if used properly can work quite well.

He also wrote the dalli gem, a fast pure ruby memcached client. Give some of those gems a try. You won’t be disappointed!

Thanks for all the code Mike! Keep on pushing concurrency to new levels.

His RubyConf talk will also be on Confreaks, but until then, find him on Twitter, Github, his blog and buy cool gear at The Clymb (only US, makes me a sad panda).

Jesse Storimer

Jesse is a fellow Canadian, and in recent times a budding, nay, accomplished author. He’s written two books to bring lower level techniques such as forking, IPC, and TCP sockets to ruby developers.

For a lot of the ruby community, the C programming language is completely foreign. Along with it go things like fork/exec, IPC, and raw TCP socket knowledge. Jesse brings these topics together in two books: Working With UNIX Processes and Working With TCP Sockets. These are important topics and will help you understand your development stack and write better code, even if you never actually use the techniques in your app. They’ll definitely make you think!

Get your fork on and level up your UNIX beard, and buy his books. Seriously. He stepped it up a bit with the newest one as for a little bit more money you can get an hour long screencast on building an evented IO server.

Thanks Jesse for the great resources, and thanks for the signed copy!

He’s all up on Twitter, Github, and his blog. Also, he is not Chad Kroeger

Ben Scofield

Ben is the man behind the curtains at RubyConf. Along with Evan Phoenix handling MC duties and his army of volunteers, Ben makes sure RubyConf happens, and happens without anything lighting on fire.

His Github account isn’t as active as a lot of rubyists, but he’s got other things on his mind. He also handles RailsConf since it’s a Ruby Central thing.

Without Ben, RubyConf probably wouldn’t have happened, or Evan’s head would have exploded. Running a conference isn’t something you can do on your own, but Ben and Evan made a pretty good team. Thanks for the conference guys! It was great!

You’ll find Ben on his blog or on Twitter.

Evan Phoenix

I mentioned Evan Phoenix just a second ago along with Ben Scofield. Evan is a director on Ruby Central, and was instrumental in RubyConf happening the way it did. He MC’d the event, and was always around to make sure things were going smoothly.

On top of that, he works on Rubinius, that other awesome ruby implementation with real threads and no GIL, and the puma webserver. These are both great projects, and give ruby developers (along with JRuby) a truly concurrent virtual machine ready for the next generation of applications.

If that wasn’t enough, he was ear to ear smiles the whole time I saw him at RubyConf. Thanks for all the code Evan, and thanks for the positive attitude.

Find Evan on Twitter, Github and on his blog.

Brian Ford

Brian Ford, along with Evan, works on Rubinius. Rubinius stays on the leading edge of ruby thanks to the hard work Brian puts in. You really should take a serious look at. It’s ahead of the curve and deserves more attention than it gets. Real threads, no GIL, and a lot of the core libraries and tools are written in ruby itself. What’s not to love?

Other languages also target the VM, which is built with other languages in mind. It’s not just a ruby VM.

Next time you see Brian, go off to your computer and install rubinius, play with it, run your app on it, report bugs and offer patches. Then go buy him a whiskey. After his talk, of course. He gives great talks. Thanks Brian!

Head over to Twitter, Github, and his blog to thank him.

Josh Susser

Josh gave a talk at RubyConf this year, and I probably should have gone, but the talk on racc was too tempting. I’ll probably watch the RubyConf video a few times and have my mind blown.

On top of talking, he’s been blogging since February of 2006, on ruby, Rails, and a variety of other topics.

You might also recognize Josh, his voice anyway, from the Ruby Rogues podcast where he is a regular with the other Rogues. Listen to that podcast if you don’t. It’s filled with good stuff. Thanks for all the knowledge Josh!

Follow him on Twitter, his blog, or his Github.

Eleanor McHugh

Eleanor is true hacker. She’s like a British female _why. She does ruby and Go, plays with virtual machines, gives talks, and can dance up a storm.

She moderated the lightning talks at RubyConf this year as well. She’s generally a positive force in whatever community she’s in.

I highly recommend her videos on Confreaks and her slides on Slideshare. Thanks for all the knowledge Eleanor!

Bug her on Twitter and Github.

Yehuda Katz, Matt Aimonetti, Eric Hodel

From left to right we have Yehuda Katz, Aaron Patterson, Eric Hodel, and Matt Aimonetti. Where to start?

Yehuda’s done Merb, Rails, Handlebars, Thor, rack-offline, and bundler.

Find Yehuda on Twitter, Github, and his blog.

Matt’s done Merb, Weasel-Diesel, MacRuby: The Definitive Guide, googlecharts, BubbleWrap, and about a billion other Github repos.

Find Matt on Twitter, Github, and his blog.

Eric? Rubygems yo! Drops the mic.

Find Eric on Twitter, Github, and his blog

Thanks guys, for all the hard work you do, code you put out, articles and books you write, and talks you give. Thank you.

Sarah Mei

This year at RubyConf, Sarah Mei gave the first female keynote. She dropped the mic and the roof blew off the convention center.

When she’s not wowing audiences, she’s writing ruby for the Diaspora project and organizes Rails workshops for women. She’s improving the ruby, Rails, and social networking communities, and getting more women into programming.

Like a boss. Thanks Sarah!

Give Sarah mad props at her blog, on Twitter, and on Github.

Gary Bernhardt

Gary drops knowledge like bombs with his Destroy All Software screencasts and his talks. He gave a great one at RubyConf. Watch the video if you didn’t get to see it. Hell, watch it even if you did.

He also likes to troll us all once in a while. But he educates and trolls with a little smirk and it makes us all giggle a little bit. He brings joy, knowhow, and entertainment in one fantastically well dressed package. Thanks Gary!

Tweet Gary on Twitter, get his code on Github, and buy his screencasts at Destroy All Software.

Phew

It’s taken me 3 days to write this up. What’s crazy is that this list is really only a small fraction of the people who deserve thanks. I tried to meet as many people as I could while at my first RubyConf, and I did a pretty good job. I didn’t get to meet and thank you all though, but there’s always next year.

If you meet somebody on this list, thank them. If you meet somebody off the list and they are contributing positively to whatever community they are a part of, thank them. Give them a handshake or a hug, buy them a drink, and thank them.

They deserve it.

To everybody on this list, to everybody I met at RubyConf, to everybody I haven’t met yet, thank you.

rc Files and You: Automating Your Project

Daniel Huckstep — 06 Nov 12 10:00 MST

I gave a lightning talk at RubyConf 2012 in Denver.

Man was I nervous.

Apparently I did an okay job though, and I'd like to thank all the people who were and took time out of their day to listen to me. Thanks! If you want to view the original talk, the video is here. Scroll to 10:15 to find me, but I recommend watching them all.

A few people had more questions (I talked really fast since it was a lightning talk after all) and this was originally going to be a blog post in the first place, so here it is, in blog form.

Your app is not one language.

It's not just ruby/python/java/go/pascal/ada/whatever. It really isn't.

You at least have bash, or whatever shell you use, and it gives you a bunch of tools.

Bash for example has functions, loops and conditionals, so you're well on your way to programming yourself out of a paper bag.

Another trick with bash (and most other shells) is that you can source files to load things into the current process. You do this everytime you start a shell actually. A .profile or .bashrc probably loads up a bunch of stuff. I have a whole mess of stuff in my dotfiles.

What I like to do is dump a bunch of project specific things into a file in the root project directory named rc. This way, I can cd into the directory and then type . rc and bash will load up all that stuff, kind of setting me up to work on the project.

My rc File For ForrestFire (source for Tinderizer.com)

I built Tinderizer.com and the source repo is called ForrestFire. I have this little blob in its rc file. I set a GOPATH variable, grab some configuration values from Heroku where the site is hosted, and have a function to tell the server to reload the bookmarklet when I change it.

I can load it up like this:

Now I can run watch and it will run puncher with the appropriate arguments. I can also access the 3 environment variables in my application.

My rc File For darkblog2 (source for the admin to this blog)

I run postgres and memcached, so I have functions to start and stop both of those. I also need to load postgres dumps into my local database, so I automate that with another function. I also alias rake because nobody likes typing bundle exec rake.

The rc File For Yardstick Measure

We also use an rc file at work, but it's much shorter, yet more powerful.

alias rake='bundle exec rake'
eval "$(./sub/bin/ys init -)"

That's weird...what's that eval "$(./sub/bin/ys init -)" nonsense?

After sourcing that file, I get the ys command. When I type that without any arguments, it spits out this:

We use sub from the fine folks at 37Signals to do this. Once you setup your sub, you dump appropriately named scripts in its libexec directory, and you get access to those commands as subcommands of the main command. rbenv uses sub if you're familiar with that.

In our setup, the sub is named ys, and we have the bugs command which opens up our bug tracking software from the command line. I can type ys bugs and FogBugz opens in my browser.

sub is awesome

This isn't a full look at sub, but the docs are great. Give them a good read if you decide to play with it.

sub basics

git clone git://github.com/37signals/sub.git [name of your sub]
cd [name of your sub]
./prepare.sh [name of your sub]

In my example above from Yardstick, I would have typed ./prepare.sh ys

Then...

Remove the .git directory.
Start writing your commands in <where sub is>/libexec/<name of sub>-<command name>
Add the eval/init stuff to your rc file.

DROP THE BASS!!!

Skrillex - Cinema

Brrrrrrrrrrr........
Wob..Wob..Wob.......
Pfffffffthhhhhhhhhh
Grrrrrrrrr........
Pfffffffffthhhhhhhh..
Wob....Wob...Wob...
Pfffthhh....Brrrrrrrr.

What Else?

It supports...

Autocompletion: Add a magic comment and a hook to tell it what to autocomplete.
Documentation: Add magic comments at the top of the file for docs when running your sub command without any args or when using the builtin help command.

But wait, there's more!

You don't have to use bash. You can write scripts in ruby, python, haskell, whatever! Just dump it in the libexec directoy, name it appropriately, and include the proper hashbang to run the script and you're set.

I think you can use compiled binaries too, but I'm not sure how the documentation and autocompletion would work in that case.

What now?

Don't do anything more than once by hand what a computer can do for you.

Automate all the things. You don't have any excuses anymore.

My RubyConf Mission: Thank All The People!

Daniel Huckstep — 27 Oct 12 14:00 MDT

Are you excited for RubyConf? I am! It’s my first time, and it’s made possible by my awesome employer, Yardstick. Thanks Yardstick!

I’m excited for the talks, though there are some time slots where it’s going to be tough to pick which talk to go to! Luckily, Confreaks records everything so I can always watch it later! Thanks Confreaks!

See the pattern?

Two paragraphs, two thank yous.

But I want more.

I want to thank you

I want to meet you at RubyConf and thank you for what you’ve done in the community. However small or large that contribution is, as long as it’s positive. If you’re out trolling the python mailing lists, well that’s not fun. Be positive!

If you’re Rescuing Resque I want to thank you. If you’re adding DTrace probes to ruby I want to thank you. If you’re putting out screencasts on rails and other topics I want to thank you.

Get the picture?

I want to talk to you for a few minutes, take a picture, record or write some notes in Evernote and pull everything together in a nice big blog post after the conference. You’re doing awesome stuff, and I want to recognize that.

I know everybody’s busy, some of you are giving talks, but there still should be lots of time to accomplish this, so please find me if I’m distracted or haven’t found you yet. I’ll be the guy with the beard and dreads. I highly doubt there are going to be other folks with dreads (though if there are, I want to meet you too).

Are you excited for RubyConf? I am.

One Week, One iPhone 5

Daniel Huckstep — 01 Oct 12 10:00 MDT

Last week, I, along with 5 million others, got an iPhone 5. I preordered it as soon as I could, and the UPS man showed up at 9:30 in the morning on the Friday. I had to go to the Telus store to get a new SIM card since my HTC Desire HD used the regular sized SIM and the iPhone 5 uses the nano SIM, 2 sizes smaller. Par for the course on Apple launch days, Telus’ system was down for most of the day, so I couldn’t activate my SIM, and hence use the phone, until about 5pm. No worries, had work to do anyway.

So is it good?

I’m coming at this not as somebody who’s been using an iPhone 4 or 4S for the past while. I was on a 3GS until Thanksgiving¹ last year, at which time Telus had a sweet deal on the HTC Desire HD. At the time it was still a good phone, but it might have been on the way out, because they must have been having a blowout sale or something. Anyway, we got this phone and a good rate plan. It was a nice upgrade from the 3GS, and I wanted to try the Android setup for something different.

Well, after a year, I got fed up with this Android and HTC crap, so I got me an iPhone.

Choices, Choices

In retrospect, the HTC Desire HD isn’t really a good example of a quality Android device. Most of friends here that use Android agree that, despite all the hardware choices in the Android ecosystem, the only real choice is to buy the Google device, and just run vanilla Android. So we’re back to no choice.

Speaking of vanilla Android, I had to flash mine to Cyanogenmod7 because an update to the Telus/HTC ROM started to crash regularly, when receiving phone calls. You know, that thing phones are supposed to do.

But it was good for a while though, probably just because it was new.

Music

I used my previous 3GS for music all the time. I tried putting music on the Desire HD, but I found no application to do syncing that worked with any reliability. Even once I got music on it, you’re dealing with a standard filesystem, so you put it here, but this music player expects it here, and this one expects it there. I couldn’t find a decent music player either; they were all just terrible. At this point I was already heavily invested in iTunes, and in the end I just never used the phone for music.

The iPhone 5 of course plays nice with iTunes, and I use iTunes Match so all my music is basically just on the phone. Apple kind of broke iTunes Match in iOS6 since you can’t delete music, it just gets managed for you. Ignoring that annoyance, I use my phone for music again. The new EarPods are also nice. They are 1 of 2 earbuds (the other being the Bose ones) that actually fit in and stay in my ear. They aren’t as good as the Bose ones, but they are better than anything else. You might have different mileage with your ears.

Photo & Video

I tried a number of gallery programs on the Android, but I also had to get a little program to “reindex” the photos, because they would just disappear out of the gallery.

WTF.

This was happening on the HTC ROM and seemed to go away once I had flashed CM7.

The camera itself was decent: 8MP stills, 720p video. It took good pictures, though it felt slow. Video was really good.

The iPhone 5 takes great pictures too, and it’s deadly fast to do so. Video is great too. I’m happy with it, and that’s what matters.

The Screen

The screen size was a step down from the Desire HD, which has a 4.3" screen, but the iPhone 5 screen is 16:9, where the Desire HD screen is…something else. It’s wider and a tad shorter. After using the Desire HD for a while, I started to find the size too big (again, coming from a 3GS).

I’m quite happy with the 4" screen on the iPhone 5. It looks good, and after using various apps that make use of the full height, it seems about right.

The Size

Damn it’s thin and light.

The Speed

Damn it’s fast.

What do I miss from Android?

The whole master account section is nice. For example, I could sign into my Google account and then Gmail, Calendar, Contacts works (which is about the same on the iPhone), but then the Google Reader application also just works. Other applications that use the Google services could just work as well.

iOS has some of this now with Twitter and Facebook integration, where applications can use those accounts without having to sign in again (Instagram and the official Twitter application for example).

The sharing stuff is nice too. Applications on Android can register something somewhere that they support sharing things like photos. Some support sharing multiple things (Google+) and some only a single item (Twitter). You can open the sharing dialog for something, and it will let you share it with any of the registered apps. This is nice for apps like Dropbox, where you can just share something into a Dropbox folder with the application not needing to know anything about Dropbox. On iOS, the app would need Dropbox sharing built in.

Dropbox is getting big enough that we might see it integrated into iOS one day, but Apple would probably have more interest in pushing Photostream and other services they control.

The global Search button was nice. Since the Desire HD had a hardware search button, I could hit that in pretty much any application and I’d get a search dialog. In iOS apps, you may have to hunt for it.

What am I glad I don’t have to deal with anymore?

The hardware Back button was useless. It rarely actually went back to somewhere I wanted it.

The general UI for the phone was fairly annoying and terrible. It doesn’t help that I was originally on the HTC Sense setup, then the ADW launcher setup (I think…). I tried another one for a bit, but it was just as bad. So many different UIs, and all were mediocre at best.

Problems

The wifi connection strength sucks, and is slow. Apple apparently knows about it, and it’s apparently a software thing, so we should see a fix soon. Okay cool, whatever. Good thing the LTE is bloody fast.

I occasionally see a little “broken LCD” technicolor line through the keyboard when inputting my password for the iTunes or App stores. Other people seem to have this problem, and it only occurs when inputting my password in those two dialogs, so I’m not concerned that it’s a hardware problem. The screen looks great the rest of the time.

Conclusion

I’ll stop rambling. This turned out to be more of a “my old Android vs my new iPhone” instead of a “one week later” post, but whatever.

Overall, it’s a big step up for me. I was already invested in the Apple ecosystem when I decided to try Android, and it just made more sense to go back. If you’re thinking about going back to Apple from your Android (or other) device, don’t hesitate. If you’re upgrading from a 4S…I don’t know. I never owned one.

In any regard, it’s not perfect, but it’s a fantastic phone.

¹ Canadian Thanksgiving

On Programming Journals

Daniel Huckstep — 03 Sep 12 10:00 MDT

You might have seen this gist make the rounds about keeping a programming journal.

Writing things down is important. Write on paper, in a bug tracker, on your hand, whatever. Just write it down.

Writing things down is important for two reasons:

It helps you remember things. Your brain has a finite capacity, and if something is written down, especially in a “public” place, it probably won’t get forgotten.
It keeps you sane. If you just try to remember everything, I’m pretty sure your head will actually explode.¹

Learn From the Pros

If you’ve read The Mythical Man Month, and you should if you haven’t, you’ll see Brooks discuss the idea of the technical journal.²

It’s similar, except more for the whole project instead of a single developer.

My Preference

I prefer things written down in the open. I don’t keep a personal programming journal, I just add comments to tickets. At work, action items and ideas from meetings go into the relevant ticket.

Thinking out loud about a ticket? You better believe that’s a comment on the ticket.

This way, my personal musings about a particular problems are there for everybody to see. It gets it out of my head, and benefits the rest of the people on the project.

For other things outside of work, I use a combination of Basecamp, Trello, and Sprint.ly to keep track of ideas I have, bugs in my code I find, checklists I need to accomplish, books I’m reading or want to read, and other relevant bits of information.

It’s all written down.

New Hotness

Moleskine makes a variety of goodies for taking notes and keeping journals. Their new offering integrates with Evernote so you can take notes with a pen on paper, but then scan it directly into Evernote for a digital version. Evernote can then do handwriting recognition and OCR and all that fun stuff, giving you a nice searchable document stored in their cloud available on all your devices. How cool is that?

Doesn’t it make you want to write more stuff down?

You should write it down. You’ll feel better about it.

¹ Head will most likely not actually explode, but then again, I’m not a medical professional.

² I don’t remember the exact term he used, but the technical lead on the project would go around and document work done by everybody in a journal. When I worked at BioWare, the technical lead on the project I was on did this.