faithfulgeek.org - modern web development

The usefulness of Truthy

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:49:04 -0400

I’ve always wondered why the Truthy gem was created; what’s so useful about it? Today I figured it out!

In Ruby if you have code like:

1 or nil

you get 1. This is because every value can be treated like a boolean. Everything is true except nil.

This is extremely useful if you want to use a default value, for example:

def say_hello(name=nil)
the_name = name || “joe”
“hello #{name || ‘joe’}”
end

This will print out ”hello” followed by name, or “joe” if name is not passed in. However, this isn’t so useful for creating methods that returns true or false based on whether or not something is nil:

def name_is_set?(name=nil)
name
end

This will return the value of name, not it’s true or false status. Great if it’s nil, but what if it’s not?

We could return “not name.nil?” and be done with it, but that would get ugly with compound conditions. Instead, how about a method that gives us the truth value of any object?

For example, say you have a private controller method that needs to determine what to do based on the status of a number of parameters being passed in:

def there_is_work_to_be_done?
not params[:param1].nil? or
not params[:param2].nil? or
not params[:param3].nil?
end

This would look a lot nice as:

def there_is_work_to_be_done?
params[:param1] and params[:params2] and params[:param3]
end

Except that would return one of the objects that is set. With truthy we can do:

def there_is_work_to_be_done?
(params[:param1] and params[:params2] and params[:param3]).truthy
end

and get the truth value instead of an object. Nice.

"Everytime I’ve had to choose between hate and love, I chose love and that’s why..."

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:03:43 -0500

“Everytime I’ve had to choose between hate and love, I chose love and that’s why I’m here.”

- A.R. Rahman at 2009 Academy Awards (2/23/2009)

In one week...

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:56:55 -0500

Over a week ago I was looking at some of things going on at work and getting pretty excited. We had a Rails 2.2 upgrade about a month or so away, I’d be introducing the team to git for a gradual conversion in a few weeks, and we were going to be writing some code in Erlang or C that I was interested in porting to Clojure as an experiment for my language of the year.

Then this week happened. We have a major redesign coming up, so now we have a GitHub repository started with the base Rails 2.2 project in it. The vast majority of our development is now going to be in that repository. Oh, and that Erlang/C project? It’s now looking like Clojure will be the answer.

After 4 months it still amazes me how quickly we can respond to major changes, and how much our company believes in the right tool for the job.

My Goals for 2009

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:57:25 -0500

Thanks to @sadukie for calling me out to post my 2009 goals. This is something I’ve given a great deal of thought this year, as I’ve never really planned out my year in advance before. I wasn’t really planning on sharing it originally, but I’m very glad I was asked to share. Over the past year, I did a number of cool things. However, I also let a number of cool things fall off the radar because I didn’t plan them out very well, or they weren’t something I was very passionate about. I increasingly felt the need to have some method to filter out opportunities based on some criteria. In 2009, I have a list of the things I want to accomplish and that will be my litmus test for any new opportunities that come in. For anyone following along at home, if you would like to see my process for arriving at these goals, please let me know via twitter (@joefiorini). Also, I’m not listing every single goal here, I have a lot of stuff I want to do, and listing every last thing will take too much time.

Speaking

I originally had wanted to slow down my speaking in order to concentrate on a side project. However, after much consideration I decided to do just the opposite. I will be submitting to a number of .NET conferences this year to speak on a topic that I love more than anything (well, almost anything): Ruby on Rails. With IronRuby making steady progress, Ruby-related topics are becoming much more relevant to .NET conferences. Since I am now working with Ruby on Rails full time, but also have experience working with ASP.NET, I would like to show other .NET developers what it is that I love so much about my newest love. I also plan on submitting to at least 3 Ruby specific conferences. I really do like all the friends I’ve made in the Ruby community so far, and would like to continue to develop those relationships while helping other Ruby developers learn about things I find cool. Not quite sure what that will be yet. Finally, I’m already slated to speak at Ignite Cleveland. Ignite is a 3 hour event in which speakers give talks 5 minutes in length containing 20 slides. My talk is titled “5 Steps to a Personal Brand”; I’ll be talking about the steps I took to build my personal brand over the past year and what I’m doing this year to continue that.

Cleveland Ruby Brigade

I want to really build the Cleveland Ruby Brigade this year. We have had some awesome meetings recently, and we now have an additional location more convenient for east siders who want to attend. In December we changed the meetings from presentation-based to coding dojo style. In January our meeting followed the Randori-style of coding dojo, which has some specific rules of its own that allows a large group to code together. I feel like the group is now a viable place for someone who doesn’t know Ruby could come and get a pretty good idea of what Ruby is all about. Likewise, those with Ruby experience can give input on the projects and help the newer members learn. I still want to have a few presentations when there’s something worth talking about, but the coding dojo meetings are great in between presentations for teaching and doing something useful with our time like donating back to the open source community. Finally, I have a couple fun events in mind for the group that I will go into more detail on later. Of course a lot of this requires money, which is why we’ll be soliciting sponsors this year. If you’re a Cleveland-based company that’s into Ruby, look out! :)

Cleveland Tech Community

My final, large goal this year is to help expose the awesome community that we have here in Northeast Ohio. There are many small technology-related companies here that most people don’t know anything about. To accomplish this goal, @joshwalsh and I will be starting a podcast featuring a representative from one of these companies, or a specific person who is doing a lot for the community here. We will discuss current topics that affect the technology world as a whole and use that as a focus of the interview. More details to come on this, including a name! Also, I plan to start posting CleRB events to the Cleveland Tech Events calendar, and I would encourage other user group organizers and event planners to do the same.

Software Craftsmanship

There is a big push in the industry to treat software as a craft. I want my work to be the best I can make it. Therefore, I’m going to continue learning this year by following the example of experienced software craftsmen before me. One ubiquitous is learning a new language every year, and this year I will be learning Clojure. Second, working in a dynamic language like Ruby, testing is much more important than it has been for me before. Therefore, I want to improve my existing TDD skills to the point where I’m TDDing as close as possible to 100% of the time. I also plan to watch the SICP lectures throughout the year (it will likely take that long). All this leads to the goal that I have a clear definition of what software craftsmanship means to me by the end of the year.

Personal

I have a little known hobby that I really want to develop this year. I’ve always been into movies, and last year I wrote a script for a short film that is still in a very messy form. One of my personal goals is to complete that script and then decide how to best distribute it, whether it be a movie, graphic novel, book, whatever. I’d also like to get out to Seattle this year; my wife wants to visit a friend, and I’ve been meaning to go back for awhile. I just love it there!

Those are my most important goals for this year. Of course, I have these all broken out into more SMART goals in my mind map. This is just an overview of what I’d like to accomplish this year. I’m agile, though. Priorities may shift, new goals may make their way in. This is definitely going to be a fun year.

Randori: All-Inclusive User Group Hackfest

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:34:00 -0500

During Spring of 2008, the Cleveland Ruby Brigade held a couple coding dojos along with standard, presentation style meetings. While they were very fun, we never got much coding done. Lack of coding at a coding dojo FTL. We realized pretty quickly the problem was that a number of our members were new to Ruby. We postponed the dojo idea until we could come up with a better way.

Fast forward to December 2008. Our group had become more intimate (read: small but consistent) but we still had a pretty large dichotomy between experienced and inexperienced members. While at the Professional Ruby Developers’ Conference in Boston, MA I decided, after talking with some other usergroup organizers, to hold a Hackfest meeting in which we would discuss and answer each other’s questions, and hopefully write some code as a group. What started out as a conversation on TDD/BDD quickly evolved into us starting our own mocking library.

While this was a great Hackfest, it was very disorganized with everyone contributing any time. This is not conducive to learning, and definitely would not scale as the group grows. We needed something different.

That something came from one of Alan Steven’s open spaces at the CodeMash 2009 conference. We had a large group (about 20 people); in order to ensure everyone got a chance to participate, we used a fishbowl format. This went so well it inspired me to try using a fishbowl format for our Ruby Brigade’s hackfests.

Tonight, we did exactly that. Although I had devised my own plan for “fishbowl pairing”, a quick Google brought me to the Randori format. The rules are listed on this wiki, but I will summarize here.

One comupter projected so it is visible to all participants
Coding is done at one computer by a pair of developers
The driver (the programming actually typing at the computer) has to get up every 5-10 minutes and let someone join the pair.
The pair at the keyboard should constantly talk about what they are doing
The pair must stop if someone in the audience loses track - and cannot continue until the member is caught up
During red bar (when the test is failing), the only audience participation is asking questions. Once the test is passing, anyone can comment on the design.
Never move on to new code if someone is not happy with the design - always refactor.
TDD is required

We followed these rules to build a Sudoku solver as proposed on this Ruby Quiz. Although we did not follow it to a T (we had a pretty small group of about 8 developers), it was extremely effective. The people with little-to-no Ruby experience were able to ask questions and understand what was being written, and the seasoned Rubyists enjoyed analyzing and solving the problem.

We did learn some important lessons however. The biggest one: REFACTOR! It’s step 7, but I must have missed it when I initially looked at the rules (about an hour before the meeting). Just as we were winding down, someone pointed out that we had not refactored at all, and were too focused on implementation and testing.

We used 5 minutes for our time interval before switching out the pair, but it was too short. 10 minutes would be much more effective for such a small group. Also, the time didn’t help when the driver was in the middle of writing or implementing a test. We decided to let the driver finish whatever code he was working on before switching out (can anyone who has done this before explain the alternative?)

After the meeting Josh Walsh and I discussed some options beyond timing the pair: switching after either writing both a test and implementation, or going “ping pong” style (having the driver write a test, the passenger implement it, this person then writes the next test, and the new passenger implements, and so on).

This was an extremely fun meeting. The Randori method was excellent for helping new members learn some Ruby and experienced members to have fun coding a problem. We will be doing this next month when we meet on the LeanDog Software boat! I am looking forward to growing the Cleveland Ruby Brigade over the next few months and seeing if this format continues to work out. I can say, so far so good!

Thanks to everyone who attended tonight and a special thank you to Within3 for sponsoring the location and food.

"When some field is just getting started and you don’t understand very well, it’s easy to..."

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:42:15 -0500

“When some field is just getting started and you don’t understand very well, it’s easy to confuse the essence of what you’re doing with the tools that you use.”

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Progams Lecture Series, Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson

This is my 2009 book list, for anyone who is interested. I...

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:26:52 -0500

This is my 2009 book list, for anyone who is interested. I believe this is a good combination of fiction and non-fiction. Living the agile lifestyle I do, this list is bound to change throughout the year as my priorities and interests shift (especially once I read Refuse to Choose).

Currently in progress:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
Hacking Vim
Heroes Graphic Novel

Links to books to read more or order:

Bookshelf picture courtesy of Delicious Library.

Check out this post on the excellent Arrested Development blog for a chance to win a book by an...

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:04:02 -0500

Check out this post on the excellent Arrested Development blog for a chance to win a book by an Arrested Development writer. Go to http://arresteddevelopmentblog.com/2008/12/arrested-development-contest-win-a-free-book-from-a-former-writer-on-arrested-development

Coloring in the Rails log (and console)

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:41:00 -0500

The following is an example of printing to Rails development.log IN COLOR! This is extremely useful for quickly finding your degugging output.

logger.debug “\e[1;31m TESTING \e[0m”

The \e[1;31m is the color code and \e[0m “closes” the coloring. The 1 in the color code specifies bold text, and 31m is the color dark red. Play around with the different colors in the script at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prompt-HOWTO/x329.html.

"A goal is a dream with a deadline."

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:48:55 -0500

“A goal is a dream with a deadline.”

- Napoleon Hill

How I made IsItCodeMashYet.com using Ruby & the Sinatra framework

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:28:00 -0500

How I made IsItCodeMashYet.com using Ruby & the Sinatra framework:

This screencast walks through creating a web application in less than 10 minutes using the Sinatra framework. The app I walk through is the very simple IsItCodeMashYet.com, a countdown for the CodeMash conference in January.

IsItCodeMashYet - Web app in under 10 minutes using the Sinatra web framework from faithfulgeek on Vimeo.

App in 3 hours: isitcodemashyet.com

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:54:59 -0500

We all love the CodeMash conference! Most of my friends are very excited for it to arrive. I felt we needed a countdown. I also wanted to give Sinatra a try. Hence: http://isitcodemashyet.com.

For anyone interested in Sinatra, you can see my source for IsItCodeMashYet? at http://github.com/densitypop/isitcodemashyet/tree/master.

If you have any questions, http://www.twitter.com/faithfulgeek. And yes, this app took me less than 3 hours from scratch to finish (this includes purchasing the domain, setting up the server, all of it).

"1 point means I know exactly what needs to be done 2 points meas I might have to double that..."

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:42:28 -0500

“1 point means I know exactly what needs to be done
2 points meas I might have to double that effort
4 points (max) means it will be a tough thing to tackle that might take a couple days.”

- Obie Fernandez

"Find a way to make your environment attractive"

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:36:19 -0500

“Find a way to make your environment attractive”

- Obie Fernandez

Fun with growlnotify! Command used: echo "this is a really long...

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:51:47 -0500

Fun with growlnotify! Command used: echo "this is a really long message and I hope it wraps." | growlnotify --image ~/Pictures/Icons/joe_avitar_02.jpg Hey everybody

Use this sometime to growl the output from an application in a script like so:

git svn rebase > /tmp/output.txt
cat /tmp/output.txt | growlnotify --image path_to_image A title

"Any company that hires an “Evangelist” should also bring on a “Ruthlessly Honest..."

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:32:12 -0500

“Any company that hires an “Evangelist” should also bring on a “Ruthlessly Honest Dick.” Just to keep the first guy from making shit up.”

- Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies)

Remember, remember the 5th of November the gunpowder treason and plot I know of no reason the...

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:34:36 -0500

Remember, remember the 5th of November
the gunpowder treason and plot

I know of no reason the gunpowder treason
should EVER be forgot

In honor of Guy Fawkes day.

"To be a good leader, you first have to be a good follower."

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:58:59 -0500

“To be a good leader, you first have to be a good follower.”

- Pastor Eric Schall

Forget all but part of the name of a git branch? Forget wasting time by looking through your list of...

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:09:48 -0400

Forget all but part of the name of a git branch? Forget wasting time by looking through your list of branches! Run:

git checkout `git branch | grep `

where is a regular expression describing the part of the branch name you can remember.

For example, I have a branch that starts with “bulk_”, so I could:

git checkout `git branch | grep ^bulk_`

Probably not extremely useful, but I’m loving learning these useful command line tricks!

Typing speed (Qwerty) after day 2. I’ll be interested to...

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:42:25 -0400

Typing speed (Qwerty) after day 2. I’ll be interested to see the effect learning this new “language” will have on my “native tongue”. My hypothesis is that I will get slightly worse at Qwerty as my “muscle memory” adjusts to Dvorak.