Jarinheit

Ruby's Reputation

2015-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Ruby’s Reputation

This blog post by Adam Hawkins stuck a chord with me. The current state and the trend of Rails as an industry has been on my mind a lot recently.

In ten short years we’ve gone from the ’How to build a blog in 15 minutes’ demo (wups!) to it becoming a major part of the web infrastructure and the basis of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of careers - mine included. It’s simply mind-blowing how far we’ve come. And it’s happened because of the sheer hard work and dedication of a (relatively) small number of individuals who are obsessed with making web development better, smarter and more fulfilling and rewarding.

But with the massive growth of Rails comes a huge responsibility for us as developers who build and maintain Rails apps, and even more so those of us that train and mentor upcoming Rails developers.

I’m sure anyone who has been working with Rails for any amount of time has inherited apps with absolutely enormous Gemfiles. Of course, Rails itself is just a collection of gems, but when auditing these applications it seems to be also guaranteed that there will be numerous out-of-date and abandoned gems, gems that are essentially one-liners or monkey patches, completely untested (or worse, badly tested) gems, or very worryingly, gems that appeared new and shiny - often with too-clever-for-their-own-good DSLs - that have influenced the design and architecture of the entire application so much that removing them would require major rewrites (how’s your test coverage looking?)

This reflects very badly on Rails as a whole and does serious damage to the reputation of Ruby and Rails developers and, more seriously, Rails and Ruby itself.

How did we get here and what do we do to begin to improve things?

I think part of the reason we arrived as this point is that Ruby and Rails make it so easy to play! In that way they’ve somewhat been a victim of their own success. I firmly believe that play is the absolute best way to learn and experimentation with new techniques is essential to becoming a better developer. But being a developer for a client (whether it’s as a freelancer, contractor or employee) carries large responsibilities. As developers who care about the products we build, the happiness and success of our clients, and also the reputation of Ruby, Rails and Web Developers, we need to ensure that we both practice and preach good, responsible development. That means taking responsibility for the code you write and also for the code you include.

Just because there’s a Gem that appears to solve your problem doesn’t mean you should immediately add it to your project. Read the code, read the tests, understand how it works, what it does, what it doesn’t do, what dependencies it has, how well it is supported, is the developer responding to issues and pull requests? And very importantly, consider how difficult it would be to remove it. If it is going to change the way the application is coded in ‘clever’ ways, it may not be a good choice. Carefully consider all of these things before dropping it into your Gemfile.

Ask yourself how you think the problem should be solved. If you used it in an application, is it’s use clear and explicit? When you’ve moved on from the project and some poor soul has inherited your code, are the new developers going to understand what’s happening, or are they going to start checking git logs and cursing your name?

We need to consider how we encourage responsible development practices in people just starting out in Rails development while also not discouraging play and experimentation.

I was recently speaking with a CEO of a successful, rapidly growing company whose business is based around a large Rails app. Up to this point, Rails has delivered on all of it’s promises, allowing him to get the company to where it is now. But now, development choices that seemed innocuous a long time ago are beginning to impede the company’s ability to develop new features and test new business ideas. This is most definitely not the first time I’ve heard exactly this problem.

As I said earlier, this is beginning to impact the reputation of Ruby and Rails developers. Maybe my concern about this is just me being selfish, but if Rails gets a bad name, by affiliation I do too. Ruby is better than this. Rails is better than this. WE are better than this.

I fully support all of the points Adam makes in his post. If you are a Rails developer, I highly recommend you read it and consider the suggestions. But please don’t stop playing, experimenting and, most importantly, enjoying working in Ruby.

NoSQL Talk At Reading Geek Night

2010-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

NoSQL Talk At Reading Geek Night

Last night I gave a brief introduction to NoSQL at the Reading Geek Night . I hope it was interesting and informative and whet your appetite for learning more about some of the the alternative datastores out there.

You can download my slides or find them on scribd

No SQL

Rails, MySQL and friends on Snow Leopard

2009-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Rails, MySQL and friends on Snow Leopard

These are just my notes for my archive, your mileage may vary. For the ultimate guide, see Mike Gunderloy’s Definitive Guide on A Fresh Cup

XCode from SL disk
Install straight from the Snow Leopard disk.

iPhone SDK
Install new Snow Leopard iPhone SDK from http://developer.apple.com/iphone
(um, yeah, nothing to do with Rails, just a reminder to me that it’s different from the Leopard version)

Ports
blow away ports since they’re broken and we’re going to install stuff from source
http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#uninstall

ImageMagick
(from source, not ports):
https://github.com/maddox/magick-installer/tree

git
http://www.icoretech.org/2009/08/install-git-from-source-on-snow-leopard-64-bit/ or http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/
First link (make from source) worked well for me.

ruby
Install RVM http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

MySQL
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#macosx-dmg (get 64 bit version)

MySQL pref pane
A nice chap made a 64 bit version of the MySQL preference pane. Make sure you’ve installed the startup items from above package first.
http://www.swoon.net/site/software.html

MySQL gem
(from http://gist.github.com/177368)
sudo gem uninstall mysql

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=“-arch x86_64” gem install mysql — —with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Update gems
(from http://gist.github.com/177368)
irb> `gem list`.each_line {|line| `sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install #{line.split.first}`}
or…
http://gist.github.com/178178 (better, I think)

Passenger
sudo gem install -r passenger

sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Passenger Preference Pane
New updated version of Passenger Preference Pane that is Snow Leopard compatible:
http://www.fngtps.com/2009/09/new-os-more-pane-passenger-preference-pane-v1-3

Moving blog to github

2009-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Moving blog to github

My Wordpress install has been hacked for the last time. In process of moving blog over to github pages…

The Future of Web Apps, London

2008-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Future of Web Apps, London

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. The event was organised by Carsonified and I have to say, they did a spectacular job. The event was possibly the smoothest-run and slickest events I’ve been too. That’s not to say I thought it was perfect, but it was an impressive event overall.

Videos of a bunch of the talks are up on the FOWA site. Hopefully more videos will be up soon, but they’ve done a great job of getting content up there so quick. He’s my pick of the talks, and my brief thoughts on the conference.

Kevin Rose of Digg opened the event (at least for me, I arrived a bit late to see the ‘official’ opening). It wasn’t really the most powerful way to start the event. Kevin is a smart and engaging speaker, but to be fair to him, I don’t think putting him on first was a great move. I’ve been the first speaker at a conference and god is it hard. You have a good boost of adrenaline as you get up on stage, but it soon fizzles and it’s really difficult to get people excited at that time of the morning. Maybe he just needed a few more shots of caffeine in him. It was however an interesting talk, but I think Kevin would have shone more in a more sociable timeslot. Watch Kevin’s talk.

I bounced around between the business and developer tracks throughout the day. There were some pretty interesting talks, but nothing that really got me too excited, with the notable exception of lolcat tamer, Ben Huh from icanhazcheezburger.com and failblog. He seems like one smart cookie and delivered an engaging talk (peppered with lolcats of course!) about how he wrangles and builds his communities. Fun, interesting and inspiring.

Francisco Tomalsky talked briefly about Objective-J and Cappuccino, the framework they built to power 280slides. As a web developer, i.e. someone who believes in the power of html, css and javascript, I can’t say that I’m going to start using their framework, but the fact that they are pulled off, leveraging the browser in a different way and produced a different way of building a true cross platform desktop-class application is astounding. Fascinating stuff. I can see some folks getting all upset that it’s not compliant html and whatnot, but who cares – that’s not their intention, nor necessary for what they are building. Impressive stuff.

For me, Day 2 was the big highlight though. Quite a spectacular lineup of people.

It kicked off with the always-interesting Tim Bray talking about his thoughts on riding the incoming economic disaster and the effect it will have on our industry. Nothing particularly new, but a really good way to kick off the day and get the brain working. Highlight reel.

Bret Taylor, founder of FriendFeed was surprisingly open and frank about how they were building their service, both on a business and technological level. Very refreshing for someone in his position to be so open and not cagey about details. Great speaker and very interesting talk. Full video.

Jason Calacanis and Tom Nixon both spoke for a little while about their thoughts on working. I’ve spun off my thoughts on this talk into a separate post, since it ended up being almost as long as the rest of this post! Great talk and very motivating. Watch the highlights.

Surviving outside of the valley was a fun talk about whether it’s possible to build a successful startup outside of Silicon Valley. Of course we know it is, and the talk focused on how we can turn some of these perceived disadvantages into advantages and also how we can try to work a little smarter. Good, not too heavy talk, both Michael Galpert (of Aviary) and Andy McLoughlin (of Huddle) were good speakers and I’m hoping the video will up up soon, if only to get the links that Andy posted for networking events in London!

Mark Zuckerberg had a sit-down chat with Ryan Carson. It’s interesting that Mark doesn’t give regular keynote-style talks, but I think this format worked well this time, especially at the end of two pretty exhausting days. Ryan seemed to relax him a bit (well, as much as I think it possible as Mark does seem a very nervous little bunny). I am somewhat curious just how comfortable the dev team are with their CEO occasionally working on their code! He made some interesting comments about the ‘other platform’ aka OpenSocial and I think he has a good point. They are without doubt the leader in this space and if you were in their position, how would you feel about being held back from implementing APIs or features? Having a common open standard is obviously the ultimate goal for everyone, but Facebook is ahead of the curve in what they can offer to developers. From what Mark said, I’m pretty confident that they will eventually adhere to the standards. Video is here.

Kathy Sierra’s talk was the perfect end of the day. As I was an avid reader of her blog I’ve wanted to hear Kathy talk for a long time and she didn’t disappoint. Entertaining, practical and incredibly motivating. Awesome stuff. Hopefully video will be up soon.

After the talks finished, we hung around for the filming of DiggNation. What a bizarre experience. The hall quickly filled up with Digg fans that were there only for Diggnation, not the conference and then things turned weird. It was like being transported to a rock concert for geeks. Cheering, whooping and whatnot. All kinda fun, albeit more than a little weird. The thing that suddenly struck me sometime in the middle of the show was that all this fuss was about a web site. Kevin and Alex are web-site superstars. Amazing. Paul Carr commented that it was “everything that’s wrong with the tech scene”. I couldn’t disagree more. I build web apps both for a living and for fun. I love what I do, but that thing that makes me the happiest is when someone else gets excited about a site I’ve built or something I’ve created. Here in this hall we had hundreds of people excited about a couple of guys talking about stories on a web site. OK, I know, there’s more to it, Kevin and Alex are both experts at playing to a crowd, but still, pretty damn amazing.

So all in all, a fun couple of days. Many thanks for Ryan and the team at Carsonified for putting it together.

iTunes Goodies

2008-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

iTunes Goodies

This post is a not-very-subtle plug for two mind blowingly awesome things that have recently appeared in the iTunes store.

Ashmore – 1000 Mile Stare

First up is my brother Colin’s band, Ashmore. Their album, 1000 Mile Stare was released at the beginning of September worldwide on iTunes.

Col plays rhythm guitar, bass and keyboards and also recorded, engineered and mixed the album.

It rocks. Go buy it now and support my little brother! (ha – ‘little’ – he’s way taller than me)

You can buy the album on iTunes, Amazon MP3 store and various other download services (does anyone actually use Napster anymore?)

Read more about the band on http://ashmoremusic.co.uk

Txtwist

My good friend Paul’s first iPhone app hit the store over the weekend.

It’s a anagram game called txtwist. Very fun, addictive, and a steal at 59p

My claim to fame is that created the logo for the app. Don’t laugh, please. You know I’m not a graphic designer in any way!

I hope you can spare a moment to take a look at both of these. Both of them have put in huge amounts of time, effort, bloody, sweat and tears into their respective projects. I’m so proud of them.

Eddie Loves You (aka Psycho Elmo!)

2008-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Eddie Loves You (aka Psycho Elmo!)

My bestest-buddy Karl has finally released his award-winning short film Eddie Loves You onto the net. It’s seriously good. Bloody funny stuff.

FYI, it’s not exactly kid-friendly – Elmo goes psycho!

GO WATCH NOW! :)

Rails, MySQL and ImageMagick on OS X Leopard

2007-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Rails, MySQL and ImageMagick on OS X Leopard

EDIT: This most likely completely out of date. I’ll update when I have the chance to do a clean install. Although that’s likely to be on Snow Loepard.

Just a note to myself for getting my other machines Rails environments up and running properly. Basically a collection of info from the Rails Weblog Angry Fly and NullStyle

Thanks guys!

Rails 1.2.3 comes pre-installed on Leopard. To get the rest of the environment up:

Update gems

sudo gem update

Install MySQL package
From the usual place

Install the Ruby MySQL bindings

sudo env RC_ARCHS=i386 gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Update: If you’re on PowerPC, instead of the above, use one of the following commands (depending if you’re 32 or 64bi). Thanks to Henry for the tip in the comments!

sudo env RC_ARCHS=ppc gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config sudo env RC_ARCHS=ppc64 gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Fix MySQL for Leopard

cd /usr/local/mysql/lib sudo mkdir mysql cd mysql sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/lib* .

Start MySQL with: (the sys prefs box doesn’t work yet)

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/safe_mysqld

Now make a link to the MySQL socket

sudo mkdir /var/mysql/ sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Install MacPorts

From here

Install ImageMagick + RMagick

sudo port install tiff -macosx sudo port install ImageMagick sudo gem install rmagick

I think that hits the main things that tripped me up. I’ll update if anything else crops up.

iPhone Apps

2007-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

iPhone Apps

Cory Doctorow came to me in a dream last night (in his steampunk van, obviously. He was a wearing a top hat too) and we talked about an iPhone app that should be written. Damn fine idea too, simple, but incredibly useful… Hacking in progress…

I think I should seek help. Seriously.

Book Published!

2007-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Book Published!

Looks like my book is finally shipping!

Update

2007-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Update

Time for a status update, I reckon.

So, first things first – work stuff. As some of you know, my business partner that I founded Incrediblinc with has accepted a job with Atlas Venture, a VC firm that have some very interesting stuff going on here in Europe. But it’s all good – I’m in the process of starting a new company to take over where Incrediblinc left off. The company will be focused on Rails development and we have some fantastic people involved – I’m really excited. In the meantime however, I am taking on Rails development projects independently. Just drop me a line if you have a project in mind.

The book is getting closer and closer to ‘done’ – we’re in the final stages now. Phew, what an experience. I listened to everyone’s warnings and tales of pain, but I ploughed ahead regardless. And I’m glad I did! I’m really pleased with the finished book, but as I’m sure is normal, would be happy continuing to add more and tweaking what’s there forever. I guess you have to let go at some time. I believe we’re on for a June release – I know it’s going to be a tough decision between Practical Social Networking with Rails and The Deathly Hallows, but who loves ya more? Alan or J.K.?

My phlog redevelopment project is coming along, but slower than I would like, simply because of the ‘real’ work I’m doing. But don’t fear fellow-phloggers, it’s shaping up to be something much cooler than I originally planned. I hope to get something out for some alpha-testing in the next month or two. Hold on in there. I’ve not forgotten you, I promise!

On a similar note, the Incrediblinc project cudlz been put on hold for a little while. I will be re-working it to be an open not-only-UK service as soon as I have a small slither of time in my schedule (ha!)

So basically, all is good and there are exciting times ahead!

Phlog Update

2007-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Phlog Update

Cross posted at phlog

Hi folks,

I just wanted to give you a quick update as to where I am with regards to the phlog transfer, fixing the current site and developing the new one.

All of the domain transfer stuff is in process and the domain will be back in my paws at the end of next week. At that point, the site will be running off my server and the whole exchange back from 20six will be complete. Right now, we are still running off their servers, but I have access to the server and have a complete backup on my server ready to switch as soon as the transfer is complete.

In the meantime, since I have access to the current server, I have been doing some housekeeping. First thing you’ll (hopefully!) notice is that there’s less spam around. There is still a fair bit hanging around, but I’ve been tracking it down and getting rid of as much as possible. I have remove approx 1.2 million spam comments so far… I’ve also deactivated a number of spam blogs. However, these are a little harder to track down automatically, but we’ll get rid of them all eventually. This has had the pleasant affect of speeding up the site a whole lot, so things should feel a little snappier.

For some reason, 20six’s mail server seems to be not accepting uploads to phlog via mail at the moment – I currently don’t know why. I’m looking into it. Worst case scenario : it’ll be up again as soon as it’s switched to my server next week.

Also, I’ve added CAPTCHA things to the sign-up procedure (hopefully stopping some of the spam blogs from being created) and to the guest-comment page. If you have guest-comments turned off, you obviously won’t see this – but if you allow guest comments (or want to turn them back on) there’s an ‘enter the scrambled text in this image’ thing. I’m not a big fan of captchas, but if it will stop the auto spam comments and allow genuine guest comments, I’m willing to put up with it for now. Eventually (new phlog!), there will be an option to moderate comments before they are posted (thanks for the suggestion, Ann!). Ultimately, I would love to use Akismet since it is amazingly awesome at killing spam, but it’s big-bucks :( That would take a whole lot of adsense clicks to pay for that!

Regarding new phlog – coding is progressing whenever I have a few spare minutes (ha!). The first draft of my book should be out of the door at end of next week(ish), so I will have more time to devote to phlog development. I’ve got some sketches for new designs here, which I will post in the near future to give you folks something to get excited about!

Anyway, Just wanted to keep you folks in the loop. Stuff is happening :)

Phlog Status

2007-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Phlog Status

This was originally posted over at phlog.net – my update to the phlog community. Short story : It was originally my site. It got sold, it’s been spammed, I’m now getting it back.

Greeting fellow phloggers,

I’m Alan, the original creator of phlog.net. I’m not sure how many of you know the story behind phlog and what has been going on here over the last 4 years (yes, we’re over 4 years old now!), so I’m going to give a very condensed version just in case you’ve lost track of who and what runs the site. If it starts to bore you, skip the next few paragraph to get to the important bit!

So, I wrote the first version of phlog over a long weekend and ran it from an old hand-me-down 200 MHz laptop with a broken screen on the floor of my study, over a 512Kbps ADSL line. When that started to feel the strain, I up’d to a little server in a datacentre in London. Still just running it out of my own pocket. Anyway, 20six, a German blogging company (they run myblog.de, a huge blogging site in Germany) was interested in what I was doing and bought the site, along with employing me for few days a week to work on it. We released the new version (what you’re using right now) a few months later and I started working for them full time.

(still with me? gooood :) ) While working for 20six, we did a lot of interesting stuff, but most of it wasn’t on building out the main phlog site. A few improvements, but nothing radical. Since I had learnt a whole lot more since I wrote the first version (and the 2nd version was just built upon the 1st version), I started redeveloping a whole new and improved Phlog. Before this was released, 20six laid off most of their UK employees, including me. So they have phlog, but not me. This was over a year ago, and as most of you know, not a lot has happened around here since then apart from us getting massively spammed and the site slowing down a lot.

I’m not at all blaming 20six, they have been great to me and they have had other things to deal with, but obviously it has upset me that the little site I started on the floor of my study has become rather neglected. So I have come to an arrangement with the good chaps at 20six and phlog.net is in the process of coming back home to me.

So here’s the important bit – if you’ve been skipping paragraphs, you should start reading again now :)

OK, so yes, after over a year of being nothing to do with me, phlog is mine again. Now I hear you all asking the big question – ‘what does this mean for ME?’ :)

So here is what’s happening and my big plan…

I am in the process of moving everything from the 20six servers to another server, which means I can complete the deal with 20six and have complete control again. After that the big stuff comes.

The current code base is not maintainable and frankly, it scares me now. So, I’m starting afresh. But don’t worry, you will NOT lose any photos or content, but right now, I’m not scared of implementing big changes. It also means that there is likely to be some disruption around here. If the site is down for a bit, or some things don’t work, please don’t worry. By all means, mail me and complain, but know that I am doing everything I can to get things running smoothly again.

I have a lot of ideas that I would like to implement on phlog, but I am also open to suggestions. I want to keep the development and running of the new phlog as transparent as possible. I want to make this a happy place for us all to hang out again.

So please bear with me for a bit. It might be a little bumpy for a while, but it will all be worth it, I promise.

I hope you understand and will support me during this transition. I absolutely promise to do my best to make phlog better, faster and more fun. But I do need your help and support. If you have any thoughts, comments or suggestions, mail me. If you want to know more about what I’m planning or have concerns about the transition, mail me. If you have offers of bandwidth or hosting, mail me. If you have offers of large amounts of cash, mail me ;) Basically, I’m all ears.

Anyway, I will post here as soon as there is any more updates, or you can read my regular blog over at alanbradburne.com.

Keep phlogging!