My favorite feature from this update might be the simplest.

Rendering partials now uses a special swap() method on Sammy.Application. By default it just uses jQuery's html() method to swap out the old content of $element with the new content. The power though, is you easily override this to provide a cool transition when a new partial is rendered.

var app = $.sammy(function() {
  
  this.swap = function(content) {
    var width = $(window).width();
    this.$element()
      .wrapInner('<div class="inner"></div>')
      .children('.inner')
        .animate({queue: false, left: "-" + width}, 400)
        .remove()
        .end()
      .html(content)
      .css({left: width})
      .animate({left: '0px', width: width}, 400);
  };
  
  this.get('#/user/:name', function() {
    this.partial('name.erb', {name: this.params['name']});
  });
  
  //...
});

Now, when you go to '#/user/aq' or similar, it will use the swap method to do a nifty transition, instead of ye old html().

Theres more examples and Sammy on the way. Come join the mailing list or hang out in irc to learn or contribute.

• Two weeks ago I released Sammy and since then its been getting a lot of great feedback. It was mentioned in a github rebase and Nick Plante wrote a great post on DDJ. I’m really impressed with what people have done with it so far. Alex Lang, especially, has fulfilled a vision I had by embedding Sammy as the client controller for a couch app. Also make sure to check out his Boom Amazing presentation tool using Sammy as the proxy for controlling a slideshow contained in a massive SVG. I’m crossing my fingers that they’ll be a video of his RailsWayCon presentation. Sammy also has a mailing list now and (hopefully) soon a dedicated IRC room.

• Gembox was featured as a great tool for viewing RDocs on RubyInside. This inspired a little flurry of activity and commits with more to come. Thanks to Samuel Elliot Gembox works in passenger pane.

• EngineYard finally posted the videos from Scotland on Rails and you can view my talk in full quicktime glory. Really you should just take the whole weekend and watch all the videos. LOTS of fantastic talks.

• Goruco is tomorrow! If you’re attending and reading this, please come find me. I’ll probably be milling around with a bearded dude (@mrb_bk).

After consulting the Rails Bridge mailing list and with the great recommendations from the community I’ve decided to split the money in half. 50% will go to the Anita Borg Foundation who have a number of great projects to support women in the development/programming communities. The rest will be donated to Rails Bridge itself. Even though its not a huge amount of money, hopefully it will make a little impact and help with some of some of these awesome initiatives.

The fund is still open until the end of the week. Please donate!

Get Started

• Watch a Screencast (iPhone)
• Read the Introduction
• Read the Docs
• Follow @sammy_js
• Join the mailing list

The Story

About three months ago, when I was knee deep in hacking and playing with Sinatra I had this weird moment as I woke up one morning: “What if I could build Sinatra in JavaScript?” At that point it was just a challenge – I had just started doing almost full-time JS for a client and it seemed like a fun project.

As I started to actually implement it (slowly in short spurts on the weekends), I realized that using the power of JavaScript’s closures and jQuery’s powerful event system, this could be something more then just a ‘clone’. It could actually be . . . useful!

With that in mind, I set out to actually make is usable. I cleaned up the code, I wrote some example implementations, and most importantly – I documented the shit out of it.

I’m pretty excited about it (can’t you tell?) especially about its possible uses for structuring applications on the front-end for RESTful Databases and services. Embed it in a CouchApp to build an entire application in JavaScript while having access to a full range of documents/querying abilities.

The Future

I’m going to continue refining and adding examples. Please feel free to email me or contact me through github with questions/feedback.

Happy Friday!

Officially, as of today, the work is being grouped and promoted through RailsBridge.
Thanks to everyone involved. I wont be there in person, so good luck to everyone at RailsConf!

Stop what you’re doing and make your project a github page. For the love of god, your project has no documentation. RDoc is cool, READMEs are decent, but descriptive websites with examples? Oh, they RULE.

At first, I was skeptical. Pages looked cool, but it seemed like a lot of effort to create a page especially one for each project. Then two things happened:

1. Tom yelled at me/us
2. I discovered the power of jekyll

The main problem that jekyll solves for github pages is the ability to have a general ‘layout’ that eliminates the HTML copy and paste you would have to do if you were managing pages for more then one project. Having a unified layout also allows you’re project pages to have a unified brand and feel – something I believe is important.

There other things that are truly great about using jekyll.

Easy code highlighting.

Highlighting a block of code is as easy as:

{% highlight ruby %}
def awesome
  "for real. I know."
end
{% endhighlight %}

Then all you have to do is grab a syntax stylesheet. You can grab mine here

Ability to write pages in textile or markdown.

I’ve been doing all my blogging in textile for a long time now, and being able to write an easy to read page that I can easily find and edit text in makes it more likely that I’ll continue to update the pages with new releases.

Ability to pass variables from individual pages into your layout to make your layout even more reusable.

This is underused, but because jekyll interprets the layout file after its read the variables from the top of your document it means you can stick variables in your YAML head that the layout can use.

For example: In my github project pages, the YAML head looks something like:

---
layout: quirkey_code
title: sinatra-gen
github_name: sinatra-gen
current_version: 0.3.0
nav:
  - name: What
    link: "#what"
  - name: Why
    link: "#why"
  - name: Usage
    link: "#usage"
  - name: Options
    link: "#options"
  - name: Dependencies
    link: "#dependencies"
---

Beyond passing the page title, I’m also passing a ton of other variables. The github_name is used to link to the downloads of the project on github – a reusable piece of code that exists at the foot of every page. In the layout it looks like:

<h3 id="installing">Installing</h3>
        <div class="highlight"><pre>sudo gem install {{ page.github_name }}
        </pre></div>
        <p>Or directly from github:</p>
        <div class="highlight"><pre>sudo gem install quirkey-{{ page.github_name }} -s http://gems.github.com
        </pre></div>
        <p>Github in thier infinite awesomeness also lets you download the source in multiple formats.</p>
        <div class="download">
          <a href="http://github.com/quirkey/{{ page.github_name }}/zipball/master">
            <img border="0" width="90" src="http://github.com/images/modules/download/zip.png" />
          </a>
          <a href="http://github.com/quirkey/{{ page.github_name }}/tarball/master">
            <img border="0" width="90" src="http://github.com/images/modules/download/tar.png" />
          </a>
        </div>

current_version and nav work the same way. nav uses a little more liquid magic to get the job done:

{% if page.nav %}
<ul id="pagenav">
  {% for nav in page.nav %}
  <li><a href="{{ nav['link'] }}">{{ nav['name'] }}</a></li>
  {% endfor %}
  <li><a href="#installing">Installing</a></li>
  <li><a href="#requests">Bugs/Feature<br />Requests</a></li>
  <li><a href="#contact">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
{% endif %}

This way I can have a super flexible nav menu, changing what I need and what I don’t in the page instead of in the layout. You can see the full code for the sinatra-gen page or the full quirkey_code layout.

Submodules for the ultimate stoke factor.

After building a couple of these project pages, I thought “Hey! I can just put my layout in its own repo and when I start a new project page, I can just submodule it!”. Great idea, unfortunately at the time, github didn’t support it. However,after nagging PJ a bit now they do!

My workflow, is I’ve set up a jekyll_layouts repository and when I first create my gh-pages branch (described in detail here), I just run:

git submodule add git://github.com/quirkey/jekyll_layouts.git _layouts

Then, the next time I push, github graciously pulls my submodule before building my page with jekyll. Sweet. Some things to note:

• You have to have a public repository for the layouts and you have to submodule with a globally accessible URL (as in the ‘public’ clone url instead of ‘your’ clone URL).
• When you switch back to your master branch, the _layouts directory wont disappear automatically. You can add it to your .gitignore OR just delete it and it will reappear when you switch back to gh-pages.

Using the power of git, there is also a way to continue editing your submodule’d layouts while in a pages branch. The trick is that while you use the public clone URL for the ‘origin’ server of the submodule, you can add your private URL as another remote for the cloned repository.

For example: If I’m in my sinatra-gen repository at the gh-pages branch, I can cd into the _layouts submodule:

[10:47 AM:sinatra-gen(gh-pages)] $ cd _layouts
[11:23 AM:_layouts(master)] $ 

If I inspect the branches I see:

[11:23 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git branch -a
* master
  origin/HEAD
  origin/master

From here I can add another remote, which is actually the same repository – just the private clone URL.

[11:24 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git remote add upstream git@github.com:quirkey/jekyll_layouts.git
[11:26 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git fetch upstream
From git@github.com:quirkey/jekyll_layouts
 * [new branch]      master     -> upstream/master
[11:26 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git branch -a
* master
  origin/HEAD
  origin/master
  upstream/master

Now If I make a change in the _layouts directory, its as easy as:

[11:28 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git commit -am "Moved around title" 
Created commit 5726d5e: Moved around title
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
[11:28 AM:_layouts(master)] $ git push upstream master
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 314 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:quirkey/jekyll_layouts.git
   5013157..5726d5e  master -> master

All of my pages code is under the MIT license so feel free to use and manipulate. If your nice and or grateful, you can link back to this site in your footer.

The episode also features Rich Kilmer – whose talk about MacRuby and HotCocoa totally blew my mind.

WTF

This weekend after reading a couple posts and a lot of tweets I started getting really frustrated about the situation surrounding Matt’s talk at GoGaRuCo. My frustration and anger did not stem from being offended by Matt’s talk, nor did it stem from thinking that everyone who was offended was wrong. It came from a gut reaction to all this horrible negativity thats spreading like wildfire.

I was at GoGaRuCo. In fact I was also speaking. I watched every talk, attended the after-parties and had one of the best conference experiences I’ve had. I learned a ton, met a ton of interesting people, and heard about things from a ton of different perspectives. I’m not going to say more then that. It was awesome.

The ‘controversy’ around Matt’s talk started as a couple smart individuals being angry and frustrated at another smart individual for making a mistake. It’s become a blame game and a reason for people to blame a single talk for the ails of an entire community that had the same issues before. I want to stay positive, so here are three simple rules of ANY community:

• You can not fault an entire community for the actions of a single individual.
• In any community there will be opposing opinions on definitions of moral correctness for n issues.
• If you actually want to change the community, you have a better chance of influencing the future community through education then the current community through preaching.

Going from the last one, lets define a problem set and move forward.

The Problem Set

Lets rip open this silver lining. If anything good comes out of this let it be that it brought a bunch of long standing issues back in to the limelight. The big complaint out of this all has been that there are not enough women in the Ruby community. It’s pretty obvious that this is an issue. I mean, out of conference of 200+ there were less then 10 women. In fact, this conference probably had more women then any other Ruby conference I’ve been to.

I’m not going to try to deduce the myriad of reasons why this is true, instead just mention something that might lead to this situation.

Ruby is not taught in Schools. If we really want to make Ruby a language and community for everyone, the only way to ensure that people actually get exposure is to get it into schools. It would be awesome if I learned Ruby in college, but beyond that – it would have been AMAZING if I had HacketyHack when I was a kid. I whole-heartedly believe that Ruby is a great first language and the veritable cornucopia of implementations and uses could convince anyone with a slight inclination to do great things with it.

FTW

Let’s actually make this happen. How can we get more women in software development? How can we bring more women into the Ruby community? I don’t have the answer and honestly, I’m not a fantastic teacher or community organizer. However, I’m a pretty decent developer and as a freelancer I’m making some decent money so that I can give some of that money to people who are much better teachers and community organizers. With that said, I’ve started a pledgie and put $500 dollars in it. After 1 month, I’m going to donate any money I’ve collected there to a charity to support either teaching Ruby/development in schools, or supporting women in development. Depending on how much we raise, I might donate to multiple organizations. If you have suggestions about specific organizations please tweet @aq or email me at aaron at this domain.

Please donate! Even if its only $2. I’ll be posting updates to twitter and here to.

Let’s try to ensure that GoGaRuCo 2025 is an awesome gathering

I haven’t even returned to NY yet – I’m writing this in Pivotal Labs SF - who were nice enough to let me steal a desk and some WIFI for an afternoon.

GoGaRuCo was amazing. Another awesome conference. Thanks to Josh Susser, Leah Silber, and the other organizers and volunteers for making a fantastic weekend of nerding out. I’m going to be posting my slides soon, and there should be a full video recording of it within the next couple of weeks. You can see a quick rundown (via live-blogging of my talk) at the Pivotal site.

(Some of) The highlights of the weekend:

• Getting a real explanation of CloudKit from Jon Crosby. Once I understood what it was – a fully compliant REST interface that abuses HTTP to create a standardized ‘appliance’ that sits on type of Rack. Think: Rack CouchDB.
• Talking to Yehuda Katz about why Javascript/jQuery is awesome and why the next version of rubygems will solve all my problems.
• Seeing Jaqui Maher talk about solving REAL problems with ruby/rails.
• Greg Borenstein blowing my mind with the knowledge that I could use Ruby to hack an Arduino.

Most importantly: I met some very cool, extremely friendly, and super-fun people in this beautiful city. I can’t wait to come back.

Update: I posted my slides from the talk at scribd

If people are interested, I’ve posted the slides online at scribd. I’ll post an update when the video is available, too.

Also here are all the libraries I mentioned in the talk.

http://code.quirkey.com/qadmin
http://code.quirkey.com/qcontent
http://github.com/nakajima/acts_as_fu

The first day of the conference was excellent. It’s been probably the best organized and best attended conferences I’ve been, too. Everyone seems to be in a great mood, and people are actually listening to the talks instead of tweeting about them. Like I said – unreal.

Excited for my talk tomorrow. I go on early. I’m going to attempt to do some live coding, so lets see how that goes. For those not there tomorrow, they are taping it, so hopefully it will be up soon for everyone to see. Also, I’ll post slides/links tomorrow night.

I’ve been here a day+ and I have yet to have a whiskey. I dont know how that happens, but I know I’m looking forward to having a couple more then one after the conference is over. Note: I have had copious amounts of bacon, so that makes it a little less of a crime.

• My proposal got enough votes (thanks everyone) and I’ll be speaking at GoGaRuCo in just about three weeks. Once again, I’m honored to be even listed on the same page as some of the other speakers. I’ll be speaking about Sinatra and considering I’m on real vacation next week, I’ll have a little less then two weeks to prepare my talk. It’s gonna be AWESOME. Also this means I’m going to be in SF the weekend of the conference (I’m staying until Monday April 20th) so if you’d like to meet up, shoot me an email or a tweet.

• Thanks to the wonderful world of open source and github, Michael Kohl added a patch to sinatra-gen that allows you to instantly create a heroku instance for you new app as you generate. Pretty nifty. I hope to write up a little tutorial with this once I return.

More soon!

• My article was published in The Rubyist! Thanks to Jeremy McAnally for getting it out. Buy a copy and support a burgeoning dead tree business.
• I was interviewed about Sinatra for Ruby Learning. Thanks to Satish. He’s doing a great job spreading the gospel of Ruby and Rails. If you’re interested in Sinatra – look for his seminars – I’m sure you’ll learn a ton.
• In preparation for my presentation I started adding what I consider pretty good documentation to a couple of my gems/plugins using github pages. See Restful Query, Qadmin, and Qcontent

Other insane news: Its less then a week from Scotland on Rails! My presentation is all wrapped up. I’m getting a little nervous, but looking forward to the fun times ahead of meeting great Rubyists from around the world and having a REAL vacation all over the UK. Exciting!

If you’re going to Scotland on Rails and reading this – please say hello at the conference. Theres a couple projects I’m hoping to hack on there, too.

Now, as I get deeper and deeper into more extreme development scenarios and harder problems, I’m wishing I could learn more about the actual field of Computer Science. The fact is, as much as you might think your problem/challenge is unique, someone has solved it before, and probably written about it, too.

So in a effort to gain knowledge, I decided to tap some of the smartest people I know – nyc.rb Not only did they return with a ton of great links and ideas, but also in talking to Luke at last weeks meetup, I found a kindred spirit and hopefully were going to do some sort of study group hack sessions in the future.

I’ve compiled all the books and other resources they suggested below. Thanks to Mike Dalessio, Paul Dix, Jonathan Katz, Ben Stein, Pat Nakajima, Anton Maximov, and the rest of nyc.rb.

AMZ = Amazon
WIKI = Wikipedia
PDF = duh
WWW = home page
Note: I also found if you’re interested in purchasing these books, straying from amazon and looking at some of the used university book sites as they generally have better prices

Books

General Computing

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2nd Edition, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman WWW AMZ PDF

The Art of Computer Programming, Donald E. Knuth WIKI AMZ

Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Michael Sipser AMZ

Machine Learning, Thomas Mitchell AMZ

Languages

Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms, Allen B. Tucker AMZ

Algorithms

Introduction to Algorithms, Thomas Cormen (et. all) AMZ

Algorithms in C++, Parts 1-4, Robert Sedgewick AMZ

The Algorithm Design Manual, Steven S. Skiena AMZ

Math

Linear Algebra and Its Applications, David C. Lay AMZ

Introduction to Mathematical Statistics and Its Applications, Richard J. Larsen AMZ

First Course in Probability, Sheldon Ross AMZ

Other Resources

A number of universities (including MIT) have put up audio and video for entire courses that can be downloaded through iTunes. MIT specifically has a number of classes on Algorithms and engineering tought by some of the authors above.

I decided not to just preach and tried to take my own advice. What came out of my first attempt is gembox. Gembox is a very light interface built on top of Ruby Gems. Download it, start it with:

$ gembox

That’s it. Ruby Gems is great starting point because it has a well defined API and a huge user-base (rubygems users === ruby users). What it doens’t have is a great web interface. Just booting up this little app gives you a pretty (albiet currently shallow) interface to your gems. This app is tiny. I chose to split it out over multiple files, but with your app could have put this all in a single file and included it in your library’s name-space. It’s that easy.

So here’s my pitch: Give your gems/libraries/code bundles beautiful web interfaces with minimal effort using Sinatra.

I think gembox was a successful little experiment and over the next weeks I’ll be updating my gems with simple interfaces.

Currently, I’m in the running for a spot to speak at GoGaRuCo. I like the idea of the attendee’s being able to vote for what presentations to have at the conference, but I think having a truncated synopsis listed might not give me the best chance. So I’d like to try to explain what I plan to talk about a little further. If you like what you hear please vote!

Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/rnyk/2493099076/