If you were considering signing up for the regional Ruby conference in North Carolina, the Ruby Hoedown, you'd better move quick. This is the mail I received this evening.
The Ruby Hoedown is less than two weeks away, and we couldn't be
more excited about it! A top-notch charity workshop, a line up of
seven great talks, lots of hallway time for meeting fellow
Rubyists, and some really sweet t-shirts add up to a great,
Southern-style conference. What, you're not registered yet? Well,
it so happens we have a few seats left, so proceed to
http://rubyhoedown.com/ post-haste and grab yours before we sell
out! And, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to
send them to organizers AT rubyhoedown.com - we're glad to help out
however we can.
See ya'll real soon now,
The Ruby Hoedown Organizers
This conference will have some great speakers (including me!) and a great crowd. Our local Ruby crowd has a lot of very talented software folk. Although the Hoedown is the first of it's type we've had here in Raleigh, I know several of the speakers and the organizers. I expect it to be top notch, so come out and join us!
I just read another classic post by Martin Fowler. Among other things, he's pointing out the distinction between when it's appropriate to go learn a new language and when you should re-use the one you already know... and there's a bit of why people like Ruby as well.
Should we strive to only have one language in our development efforts?
A few gems from the posting:
...many frameworks resort to configuration files, which are effectively external DomainSpecificLanguages written in XML - which adds a jigger of 80 proof ugliness to them...
For many developers, the one-language notion is a sign of lack of professionalism....
Time and time again I hear experienced Java and C# developers report they are more effective in Ruby - which is why I've been encouraging Ruby. It wouldn't surprise me if similar reports appear in the next few years about other languages too...
Enjoy!
My blog entry on my OSCON talk had a spike in visitors, so I looked at my logs and found this:
http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/20070711.html
Cool.
This picture on Dave Thomas' flickr stream just sums it all up. I wish I could read Matz' addition!
RubyKaigi2007_59
If you can't say this about your programming language (or your career for that matter!), you're doing it wrong.
I'm always hearing people say that they want to have local docs like the ones at the Ruby Rdoc page. I've also wanted this and looked all over for a way to download these docs and haven't found them. Everyone says "Use Rdoc" but nothing more. I've only used rdoc on my own project and just didn't get what they were suggesting.
With Rdoc, it takes a few minutes to generate them, but you can make your own local copy of any Ruby docs. I think 90% of the Ruby/Rails world knows this already, but those of weren't in the secret, try this.
cd into your local directory that holds your Ruby/Rails code. This could be your own project code, /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-1.15.3 (to generate your Active Record docs), or /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8 (to build your own core Ruby docs). Since Ruby is interpreted, you've got all the system code right there on your own box.
Create a directory in your home folder called rdoc (or whatever you'll remember).
type rdoc -o ~/rdoc/activerecord or rdoc -o ~/rdoc/ruby or so on. Rdoc wants to create that last directory itself, so don't help it out by having it in place already.
When you're done, you'll have a nice, very fast, local copy of the docs. More importantly, you've created docs that match exactly what's installed on your machine.
It does take a few minutes to generate your own copy of the Ruby core docs, but the rest run fairly quickly.
